My 25.10 --> 26.04 upgrade experience. Many things went wrong

Budgie Desktop
1

I was prompted to upgrade to 26.04. The installation process was 99% OK. But things went worse upon reboot.

I was not presented with the graphical logon page. Instead I was presented with a text terminal logon. I had no idea how to get the desktop environment restored, and so I took to google gemini to get some answers. Along the way, I upgraded my Nvidia drivers from 580 to 595, clutching at straws (it didn’t help, but it didn’t wreck anything else). There was a lot of unsuccessful suggestions, but this one got me to the graphical logon, persistenly following a reboot.

sudo systemctl disable sddm.service
sudo systemctl enable --force sddm.service
sudo mkdir -p /etc/systemd/system/graphical.target.wants
sudo ln -sf /lib/systemd/system/sddm.service /etc/systemd/system/graphical.target.wants/sddm.service
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo reboot

I can’t say I knew what I was doing here, but my next challenge was that I had a white background for the login page. My previous picture shown on /usr/share/backgrounds wasn’t showing. No matter what I did to the theme.conf file, it was just showing a white background. It took a lot of gemini suggestions, but eventually this did the job:

sudo slicksddm-customize --set “General/use-accounts-service-backgrounds=false”
sudo systemctl restart sddm

Again, no idea what I did there.

I had three screens, and their displays were all sitting right ontop of each other. I managed to separate them out using the wdisplays application.

I had the old dock, and the new dock sitting one above the other. I had to force the new dock onto the left hand edge of the left hand screen, otherwise the application launchers were frozen.
*
killall crystal-dock
sed -i ‘s/position=[0-3]/position=2/’ ~/.config/crystal-dock/Budgie/panel_1.conf
nohup crystal-dock > /dev/null 2>&1 &*

Wallstreet no longer worked, so I disabled it. I installed apt Variety in it’s place to get my changing background images back.

A number of apps installed from apt didn’t work:

  • OBS Studio → apt remove, flatpak installed
  • Shotcut would only run correctly once I started it with this command:
    env QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb shotcut

All told: 26.04 upgrade was a bad experience. It took about 6 hours to figure this all out. I could imagine that while it “just works” as a fresh install, it would be a gunshot to someone elses confidence if they didn’t know how to get past the text logon to the familiar graphical interface. Thankfully I have the presense of mind to take a backup image of my machine prior to upgrade, so I had a reverse gear if I couldn’t fix this..

Previously my upgrade from 24.10 → 25.04 → 25.10 was uneventful.

I’ve still got a windows program on wine that crashes after a few minutes to fix (CLS2Sim), so I’m not 100% back to the way things were, but I’m getting there.
X-Plane 12 can’t be pinned to the dock either.

2

I’m wondering if you are missing either ubuntu-budgie-desktop or ubuntu-budgie-desktop-minimal meta packages. Without it the upgrader would not have installed all the requisite packages - and worse might have removed key packages. budgie-desktop-environment is a key package as well - if that had gone awry then many budgie related packages wouldn’t have been installed

The white screen probably meant the key budgie-sddm-theme package wasn’t installed - hence my immediate thoughts that one of the key meta packages wasn’t there in the first place.

Wallstreet “no longer worked” - again, if the upgrader was having problem you might have been left with the old 25.10 version.

3

Personally, I wait and reinstall: I did that with 24.04, and I’m doing it again with 26.04, even though I’ll admit it has better graphics on my laptop.

In short, 26.04 isn’t my daily driver yet, even though I’ve tweaked it to work around the little glitches that were bothering me.

4

I had 26.04 installed on one of my machines and become infuriated one reboot after. Nothing worked the way I had configured it on 25.10. Plank was gone, my layouts and makeovers were gone, it took me about a day to restore part of my setup and laf. As a result I am still sticking with 25.10 on my main machine.

I really am frustrated and disappointed. I have been suggesting Ubuntu Budgie to many people, a considerable number of them now flooding me with complaints…

As a matter of fact I am thinking of choosing another distro now.

5

I have no stake in the company, but I responded differently by researching and publishing workarounds while waiting for things to settle down.

Still, we have to give credit where credit is due for the work that was done, even if the result surprises or confuses some people. :roll_eyes:

6

All,

thanks for the feedback

I can confirm that there is a serious issue if you have previously installed with the minimal install option. At the end of the process, when you are asked whether to keep or remove packages, if you press REMOVE, it will remove SDDM and leave you with a TTY.
If you press KEEP then all is ok.

For the moment I’ve revised the release notes - Ubuntu Budgie | Ubuntu Budgie 26.04 LTS Release Notes

The minimal install issue is a bug and should be reported to launchpad - I’m guessing initially against the update-manager - the triagers will advise further if that is the wrong package

7

Ubuntu devs have found what causes the issue of the TTY after the uplift (hopefully).

If you want to follow along this is the launchpad issue and the current proposal to resolve

8

I’m using 24.04… and sticking with it till end of life… then I’ll upgrade to 26.04. I did the same exact thing last time. Maybe it’s boring but at least its predictable… and no BUGS. Have also been experimenting with Linux Mint on an old Thinkpad… and have installed Plank together with Cine-Menu to create a somewhat similar look to Budgie, but its not the real deal. Is it an alternative option? Only if Ubuntu gets REALLY horrible and comes crashing down. :rofl: