The Unwanted Error Message of: Reinstall EVERYTHING, Loser

[cimorene]

1. My software updater (Ubuntu 21.04) told me the other day that I urgently needed to upgrade to the current version because support had ended for the one I was using.



2. I tried the Upgrade function in the software updater. (The last time I tried that it borked several parts of my system and I had to reinstall from scratch. But the automatic way takes like 10 minutes vs like 2-3 hours if everything goes well with a clean install... so I tried it.)



3. I rebooted my system and no browsers would launch... at all. Guess it didn't work!



4. I used waxjism's computer to make an install stick and used that to create a clean install.



5. ~30 minutes later after system reboot, I discovered the clean install... ALSO wouldn't launch any web browsers. The clean install only has one browser though, Firefox, so it's not QUITE as suspicious as the upgraded one's two. I use the software store to install Midori, one of those lightweight browsers, and google how to fix either Firefox or Chrome.
   
   

   ↳I learned that this is an Ubuntu-specific problem - other variants are not having it. Basically Ubuntu and Mozilla agreed, together, to replace the standard Firefox in 21.10 with a "Snap package", which is a new software packaging system for Linux (?) that is renowned for being slow and buggy. Great idea guys! Basically they're using the whole userbase as a beta testing pool because the next release (22.04) is going to be a long term release and they want to make sure it's stable by then because in the long-term I guess they're trying to migrate it to Snap packaging, whatever that is, for good. Anyway there are lots of people installing their OS and finding when they click on the app icon it doesn't launch, and that applies to Chromium too (Chromium is the fully open-source browser that Google uses as the basis for Chrome). Chromium is also now a Snap and it's also not launching for some people, which is why mine didn't work.

   
   
   So I removed Firefox using the software store to get rid of the Snap package and installed it from the command line, opened it to make sure it worked, then deleted its user profile directory and replaced it with my saved one, and it worked.



6. But then I discovered I was going to have to start over because on install I accidentally got my two media harddrives mixed up. The names were swapped so all the filepaths were wrong and all my links would be borked, and when I tried to fix it in fstab it didn't fix it in the file browser.



7. So I reinstalled from scratch again. This time when I went to remove Firefox with the software store, the software store wouldn't launch either. I googled about this using Midori and ultimately couldn't figure it out, but I was able to install gnome-software and it worked, although some of the icons were broken and it looked a little sketchy. The reinstalled Firefox launched as desired, but for some reason replacing the profile directory didn't work this time. I signed into sync and recovered my tabs, but all my extensions and toolbars are gone.



8. And now it's been a little more than three hours, so I guess my estimate wasn't far off! I'm mostly done now. The theme is all that's left.

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

OH NO

What you are describing would break me. I bow to your greatness.

[cimorene]

An upgrade hasn't gone this badly in quite some time, but it used to be way worse when we started using Ubuntu Linux, so I guess in a vague, almost existential way I was prepared. I wasn't prepared to run into so many snags and have it take so long, of course. I didn't get anything else done yesterday.