18.04.5 LTS to 20.04.1 LTS update?

18.04 is LXDE. 20.04 is LXQt.

My understanding is that there is no supported upgrade path from 18.04 to 20.04.

Today, I was presented with this:

Normally, I’d mash that button just to see what happens, but this particular install is still in good shape and I haven’t really broken a whole lot with it. (Give it time! I’ll tweak one setting too many!)

I’m not sure that I should even have been offered this upgrade, though I do have it set to notify of new LTS releases. But, there’s no upgrade path between the two - or is there and I just don’t know about it?

Basically, I want to know what’s going to happen if I mash that “Yes, Upgrade Now” button.

I do have suitable backups, but I’d like to not invest that much time today.

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Your Ubuntu base see’s the upgrade path open so it’s offered to you.

However, the Lubuntu team recommends you don’t take it.

On each release notes from Lubuntu 18.10 to the latest Lubuntu 20.04.1 LTS you’ll see a paragraph like the following from 20.04.1’s release notes

Note , due to the extensive changes required for the shift in desktop environments, the Lubuntu team does not support upgrading from 18.04 or below to any greater release. Doing so will result in a broken system. If you are on 18.04 or below and would like to upgrade, please do a fresh install.

How broken it will be, will depend on what packages & changes you’ve made to your prior LXDE system. It may be obvious, or the problems may become more apparent over time (minor glitches becoming more serious).

Yes it’s possible to upgrade (I did it from 18.04 to 18.10 following documentation written by the Lubuntu team during the development cycle), but the problems took time to solve before my machine was back to fully-usable. Experiences like mine meant the upgrade cycle is not supported (ie. you should expect problems, and you better be prepared to deal with it yourself due to unsupported nature).

A clean install does give a cleaner experience, is faster too (install is far quicker than a release-upgrade, even if you are restoring some user files from backups).


If you want to limit the restore time, you can use Manual Partitioning and use existing partitions without format checked. This will cause system directories to be wiped, but user files won’t be touched. It may not be as clean an experience, but is my normal ‘backup’ option if I have problems with release-upgrade. I have limited experience in the LXDE → LXQt switch (but have used it on a few boxes), however any issues that were left I’d have just fixed myself easily. These issues were minimal (I don’t remember them) when compared to the release-upgrade issues on my primary box. Your experiences may of course differ as I bet anyone reading this will have different packages & configs to my own choices.

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Yeah, I have my partitioning set up to preserve /home. It’s just a pain to move stuff back to it, but not insurmountable. It’s also not on the list of things I want to do today. That’s pretty much how I understood it.

I’ll mark that as the solution - and then tell it to “Ask Me Later.” Maybe when it asks me again, I’ll be more in a mood to experiment and see just how broken the system is gonna end up. Worst case, I have good backups and am pretty diligent with my backup strategy.

If I have energy, and that’s a big if, I’ll go ahead and document it and toss it up online somewhere.

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