Ubuntu 22.04 upgrade report

(Above: A slice of the official Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish wallpaper)

Hey there! Since Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish has recently been released, I've upgraded multiple machines to it, and I have enough to talk about that I thought it would be a good idea to write them up into a proper blog post for the benefit of others.

For reference, I've upgraded my main laptop on 20th May 2022 (10 days ago as of writing this psot), and I've also upgraded one of my desktops I use at University. I have yet to upgrade starbeamrainbowlabs.com - the server this blog post is hosted on - as I'm waiting for 22.04.1 for that (it would be very awkward indeed if the upgrade failed or there was some other issue I'm not yet aware of).

The official release notes for the Ubuntu 22.04 can be found here: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/jammy-jellyfish-release-notes/24668

There's also an official blog post that's ranked much higher in search engines, but it's not really very informative for me as I don't use the GNOME desktop - you're better off reading the real release notes above.

Thankfully, I have not encountered as many issues (so far!) with this update as I have with previous updates. While this update doesn't seem to change all that much aside from a few upgrades here and there, by far the biggest annoyance is shipping Firefox as a snapd by default.

Not only are they shipping it as a snap package, but they have bumped the epoch number, which means that the packages in the official firefox apt repository (beta users like me, use this one instead) are ignored in favour of the new snap package! I mean I get that shipping packages simplifies build systems for large projects like Firefox, but I have a number of issues with snapd:

• Extra disk space usage: every snap package has it's own version of it's dependencies
• Permissions: as far as I'm aware (please comment below if this is now fixed), there are permissions issues if you try to load a file from some places on disk when you're running an app installed via snapd, as it runs in a sandbox (this is also true of apps installed with flatpak). This makes using most applications completely impractical
• Ease of updates: A minor annoyance, but with apps installed via snap I have 2 different package managers to worry about
• Observability: Another minor concern, but with every package having it's own local dependencies, I'm makes it more difficult to observe and understand what's going on, and fix any potential issues

This aside, apt does allow for pinning apt repositories to work around this issue. I'll be posting a blog post on how this works more generally hopefully soon, but for now, you want to put this in a file at /etc/apt/preferences.d/firefox (after installing one of the above 2 apt repositories if you haven't done so already):

Package: *
Pin: release o=LP-PPA-mozillateam
Pin-Priority: 1001

...then run this sequence of commands:

sudo apt update
sudo apt purge firefox # This will *not* delete your user data - that's stored in your local user profile 
sudo apt install firefox

The above works for both the stable and beta versions. Optionally: sudo apt purge snapd.

I also found this necessary for the wonderful nautilus-typeahead apt repository.

This was the most major issue I encountered. Other than this, I ran into a number of little things that are worth noting before you decide to upgrade. Firstly, for those who dual (or triple or even more!) boot, the version of the grub bootloader shipped with Ubuntu does not detect other bootable partitions!

Warning: os-prober will not be executed to detect other bootable partitions.
Systems on them will not be added to the GRUB boot configuration.
Check GRUB_DISABLE_OS_PROBER documentation entry.

....so if you do run more than a single OS on your system, make sure you correct this after upgrading.

Another thing is that, as usual, Ubuntu disables all third party apt repositories on upgrade. I strongly recommend paying very close attention to the list of packages that do-release-upgrade decides it needs to remove, as if you install e.g. Inkscape or Krita via an apt repository to get the latest versions thereof, you'll need to reinstall them after re-enabling your apt repositories. Personally, I say "no" to the reboot at the end of the upgrade process and fix my apt repositories before then running:

sudo apt update
sudo apt dist-upgrade
sudo apt autoremove
sudo apt autoclean
# See also https://gitlab.com/sbrl/bin/-/blob/master/update-system

...and only then rebooting.

While GitHub's Atom seems to be more and more inactive these days as people move over to Visual Studio Code, I still find myself using it regularly as my primary code editor. Unfortunately, I encountered this bug, so I needed to edit /usr/share/applications/atom.desktop to add --no-sandbox to the execution line when starting Atom. The Exec= line in that file now reads:

Exec=env ATOM_DISABLE_SHELLING_OUT_FOR_ENVIRONMENT=false /usr/bin/atom --no-sandbox %F

This issue only occurred on 1 of the 2 systems I've upgraded though, so I'm not sure of the root cause. Other random issues I encountered:

• GDM has a truly awful shade of grey in the background now. This repository gives a way to fix this problem. Try to avoid an image that's too light in colour, as the white text of the lock screen becomes rather difficult to see.
• Speaking of backgrounds, the upgrade reset my desktop background on both machines I upgraded. Make sure you have a copy of it stored away somewhere, as you'll need it. lightdm (the login screen I use on my main laptop in place of gdm) seems to be fine though.
• tumbler - a d-bus thumbnailing service - was also automatically removed. This does not appear to have caused me any problems so far (though image previews now make transparent pixels appear white, which is really annoying and I haven't yet looked into a fix on that one), so I need to look into this one further.
• If you're a regular user of Memtest86+, it may disappear from your grub bootloader menu if you use EFI boot now for some strange reason.
• The colour scheme in the address bar of Nautilus (the file manager) seems a bit messed up for me, but this may have more to do with the desktop theme I'm using.

If I encounter any other issues while upgrading my servers in the future, I'll make another post here about it if it's a significant issue, or comment on/edit this post if it's a minor thing.

If you encounter any other issues upgrading that aren't mentioned here, please do leave a comment below with the issue you encountered and the solution / workaround you implemented to fix it.