Ubuntu 25.04: Update apparently temporarily stopped

The upgrade offer from Ubuntu 24.10 to 25.04, for example, led to massive problems on various systems. Ubuntu has therefore now temporarily stopped the upgrade until the problems have been resolved.

The problem apparently affects the Kubuntu dialect with its KDE desktop. In Internet forums such as Askubuntu, there are indications that after starting the offered update and being asked whether obsolete packages should be removed, too many packages are obviously being cleaned from the system. For example, one affected person writes: "After a restart, the log-in dialog appeared. But after entering the password, nothing happened." No session could be selected, there was no choice. The user could help himself at the console, which opens by pressing the Ctrl, Alt and F3 keys simultaneously, by reinstalling the packages "plasma-desktop", "kubuntu-desktop" and "sddm" using sudo apt install --reinstall and then calling sudo dpkg-reconfigure sddm to set it properly up again.

Ubuntu update: Error reports in internet forums

Further similar reports from affected users can be found on reddit. Some are confronted with a Gnome desktop instead of a KDE desktop, others with no desktop at all. The maintainer Simon Quigley from Kubuntu has also reported on reddit and discusses the problem.

The installer for the upgrade from Kubuntu 24.10 to 25.04 is loaded as a tarball from the archive. The maintainer has ported this to "PyQT6". A few weeks before the release, he contacted some of the Kubuntu, Ubuntu Studio and Lubuntu teams and pointed out that they would be installed on the computers without "pyqt6". Installing the package before starting the installer should solve the problem, writes the maintainer. A fix is in the queue.

In another reddit post, Quigley explains that there are more problems that need to be investigated: "While I had something to do with it, there is a much deeper problem at work that we don't know about yet". He has therefore handed this over to the Ubuntu developers, who have initiated a temporary hold on the update. No official statement can be found on the Ubuntu website over the Easter weekend, so it is also unclear when the upgrade to Ubuntu 25.04 will be offered again.

A similar situation occurred last September. There, too, Ubuntu stopped the update for a short time after some people experienced problems with the point release 24.04.1. The description from Ubuntu was that the Ubuntu release upgrader showed errors in the way it handled the apt solver,

(dmk)