I have made multiple attempts to upgrade from 20.04.4 LTS to 22.04 LTS via Terminal, but I get the following output:
sudo do-release-upgrade
Checking for a new Ubuntu release
There is no development version of an LTS available.
To upgrade to the latest non-LTS development release
set Prompt=normal in /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades.
Interestingly, when I adjusted the preferences to allow for a non-LTS upgrade, the same command offered to upgrade me to 21.10 (whereupon I did not proceed).
In case it were relevant, I am based in the United Kingdom and using a Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop that has both Lubuntu and (a very old version of) Windows.
Does anybody have any idea why the 22.04 LTS upgrade appears not to be on offer? Could it be, for instance, a matter of hardware incompatibility (in view of limited RAM or something)?
This is intentional behavior. LTS upgrades from one LTS release to the next aren’t permitted until after the first point release of the newer version. So you can’t upgrade from 20.04 to 22.04, but once 22.04.1 comes out, you should be able to upgrade. This is so that any instabilities in the newest LTS release can get ironed out by all us users who have “shiny new thing syndrome”, and then once we finish crashing through the first six months of the mess, we can deliver a more stable product to those who need the stability.
If you, like me, have “shiny new thing syndrome”, you can download the 22.04 ISO from the Lubuntu website and install it over the top of your older distro. I believe there’s a way to do this from within the live installer that keeps your data and applications (though you should ALWAYS back up before trying stuff like this).
Quick word of warning: Ubuntu 22.04 has os-prober disabled by default. os-prober is the feature of GRUB that makes it so that all your operating systems appear in the boot menu. This is a security feature, however it also means that you’ll probably be unable to boot Windows once you have Lubuntu 22.04 installed. I’ve put instructions on how to work around this problem here: Just installed Ubuntu 22.04 on a dual-boot setup, now my other OS isn't showing up - Ask Ubuntu
Users of Ubuntu 21.10 will soon be offered an automatic upgrade to 22.04. Users of 20.04 LTS will be offered the automatic upgrade when 22.04.1 LTS is released, which is scheduled for the 4th of August. For further information about upgrading, see:
The Ubuntu Release team control what is seen for main Ubuntu and all flavors, if you’re interested in the mechanics you can read an answer I wrote here which was written shortly after 22.04’s release, before the meta files were modified to allow 21.10’s upgrades.
I’ll also note the 4th August is a guide only, as that is a Thursday and all ISO releases are scheduled for a Thursday, but the ‘taps’ that enable the upgrades from prior releases are not usually enabled until early the next week, so if I’d have written the announcement I’d have included the word after, ie. after 4th of August 2022.
This is called “Install using existing partition” in our Testing Checklist - understanding the testcases. That link is intended to help QA-testers understand it, not end-users, thus the examples provided of data files (music) & non-standard music player (clementine) which are mentioned to represent the manually installed apps of end-users such as yourself. It may still be helpful to letting you understand how it works.