22

Message to upgrade to Pop!_OS from UbuntuI have Ubuntu 18.04 and I just received a notification that I can upgrade to Pop!_OS 19.10. Why in the world would this happen? Did I break my system? Has anyone else had something similar happen?

The only thing I have installed from Pop!_OS is their icon theme. Could it be because I have their ppa on my system? How can I clear this notification and request to update?

cmak.fr
  • 8,696
bmcentee148
  • 869
  • 2
    Go to Software & Updates, track their ppa and disable them. – Liso Nov 14 '19 at 02:16
  • 2
    My guess is you've polluted your sources with Pop!_OS ones, so I'd check your sources. apt and package tools upgrade to the latest tools, and downstream OSes use this to ensure their packages get used; thus downstream sources can cause an upstream OS to become polluted when added. You're likely only seeing a text message; I'd fgrep and find it, then dpkg -S to find what package introduced that onto your system – guiverc Nov 14 '19 at 02:16
  • @Jim I have tracked the ppa that is system76/pop/** This seems to have made the message disappear. – bmcentee148 Nov 14 '19 at 02:45
  • @guiverc I do not understand. I posted a picture that shows the message in my update software center. If it is just a text message where exactly do I use fgrep? And how can that then be used with dpkg -S in order to find the package that caused the problem? – bmcentee148 Nov 14 '19 at 02:46
  • 2
    That's good, the message seems to be caused by pop os ppa. – Liso Nov 14 '19 at 02:57
  • @Jim actually, the option to upgrade still exists in my about page as previously depicted. Other than that one icon repository, I have no explicit ties to system76 or pop os. I looked at this via the synaptic package manager. No idea where to go from here. – bmcentee148 Nov 14 '19 at 03:28
  • It's a silly question— but have you tried restarting the system, and check again if it is gone ? – Liso Nov 14 '19 at 03:50
  • @Jim Yeah, sadly that did nothing for me. – bmcentee148 Nov 14 '19 at 04:26
  • Related: Ubuntu 18.04: Missing Problem Reporting option in Privacy Settings – Kulfy Nov 15 '19 at 07:03

2 Answers2

32

By adding the Pop PPA, you've received the patched version of GNOME Control Center, which pulls in pop-upgrade, which will prompt to upgrade to Pop!_OS 19.10. It's a required dependency of the patched version of gnome-control-center, so removing it would also remove the control center. We don't recommend adding the Pop! ppa on top of Ubuntu. We apologize for the issues it caused!

Emma Marshall
  • 341
  • 1
  • 2
  • 2
  • 1
    Thanks, after doing some detective work late last night I realized that this was the cause of the issue. Removing the pop-upgrade from my system also caused huge problems, but that could've been my fault. After I removed it, I no longer had a settings app and other oddities. I used Time Shift to go back, remove the Pop! ppa, and then upgraded without issues. Thanks for your feedback though Emma, much appreciated. – bmcentee148 Nov 14 '19 at 23:09
  • How do you recommend fixing such a situation? – nealmcb Nov 15 '19 at 15:17
  • @nealmcb Read my other answer I will soon mark as a solution. In order to remedy the situation, I could not just remove the pop-upgrade package. Doing so caused a bunch of other problems. The simplest solution I found was to roll back using TimeShift to a point where I had not installed the newest version of control center, and then remove the system76/pop ppa, then upgrade as normal. It's important to be careful when using dist-upgrade or upgrade --with-new-pkgs because this is how the pop-upgrade problem ended up on my system. Always read what the results of your command will be. – bmcentee148 Nov 15 '19 at 23:31
  • Thank you, @bmcentee148, and I am glad you found a solution and documented it, with tips for avoiding the situation! But not everyone has such good backups, so I am still hoping that Emma and the Pop! OS supporters provide robust instructions for other common situations. – nealmcb Nov 17 '19 at 00:21
  • 1
    The PPA now seems to have a warning on Launchpad as well as while adding repository. The warning states: This PPA is for Pop!_OS, and it may cause breakage on other Ubuntu-based OS's. Use of this repository on non-Pop_OS installations is at your own risk! – Kulfy Nov 27 '19 at 08:00
12

So I figured out what the issue is after some detective work and some experimentation. I had the Pop! ppa on my system for some reason. I guess this was a side effect of using the Pop Icon theme. I was searching through folders in /var/lib/ and found an empty pop-upgrade folder. At first I was not certain what it was, but it was entirely too coincidental for me to have a Pop!_OS system upgrade message and run across this folder and not have them be connected.

I have TimeShift on a daily schedule (highly recommend this people) so I decided to just sudo apt-get remove pop-upgrade and see what happened. I did this and then used autoremove but I ran into issues. I no longer had an ability to get to my default Gnome Settings menu. There were probably a bunch of other issues.

So what I did was I used TimeShift to go back to the day before, and when I went to apt-get upgrade I realized that gnome-control-center was being held back from upgrading because it needed additional packages. Those packages were libpop-upgrade and something else. So now I had it cornered. I must have used dist-upgrade earlier that night without realizing it, and it just force installed those extra Pop! packages, which led to the message. After I removed the Pop! ppa from my sources list, gnome-control-center no longer wanted to update, and pop-upgrade was not requesting an install.

Basically, do not have Pop! ppa on your Ubuntu system, because it will cause problems. I should have seen this coming but I am still only an intermediate with Linux. If you have already run into this same problem I had above, roll back to a previous point in time before the gnome-control-center upgrade, and remove the Pop! ppa from your system. Then you should be able to use update and upgrade without contaminating your system.

bmcentee148
  • 869
  • 3
    I did sudo apt remove --autoremove pop-upgrade and then sudo apt install gnome-control-center and I got settings menu back. – rsaavedra Dec 26 '19 at 21:33