[PLUG] Ubuntu MATE 16.04 Update Failure

[John Jason Jordan]

On Fri, 8 Jun 2018 12:40:35 -0700
Dick Steffens <dick at dicksteffens.com> dijo:

>I've never done an upgrade, only updates. Most of the time, and all of 
>the time in the past five or more years, I've always had another
>machine on which to try out the newer version. I'm in that state now
>with 18.04. I did an install of Ubuntu MATE 18.04 on my other desktop
>machine and ran into problems. Someone pointed out that waiting for
>18.04.1 was safer, so I'm doing that. Meanwhile I still get notices to
>update 16.04. So I'll go through the other recommended steps after
>work this afternoon, and see how that goes.

Everyone tells me to do a clean install instead of a dist-upgrade. That
probably works well for them because the stock install has almost
everything they need. For me a fresh install is a pain. The last time I
did it I spent a week getting everything installed and configured. I'm
not exaggerating - a full week of long days. 

I recently did a dist-upgrade of the computer I'm writing this on from
14.04 to 16.04. Lots of things were messed up, but it took me only a
couple days to get things back in order. And Ubuntu deliberately does
not list a new LTS as available in the Update Manager until the first
dot release.

But regarding things getting messed up, why in the hell did the
dist-upgrade decide to uninstall all my KDE apps? And after the
dist-upgrade I found that I could not reinstall any of the KDE apps (or
anything else) because I had broken packages. Synaptic said it fixed the
broken packages, but it did not. I tried sudo apt-get update, but that
failed also ('can't update because you have held packages.').
Eventually I got relief using aptitude at the command line. 

I used to be a fan of Debian package management because it seemed more
foolproof than RPM. Lately I'm having second thoughts.