Attempts to apt upgrade on my 20.04 workstation is met with a notice that certain security updates require a Pro subscription with “esm-apps” enabled. My desktop has been nagging me with notifications — daily — that 20.04 will no longer be supported this year. This despite 20.04 being an LTS release that should provide security updates for another couple of years.
Sure, this might be a simple bug in their apt implementation, but it’s been present for weeks now. It’s a sign of corporate-driven rot, and my 30 years experience in the industry tells me that this is the tip of an iceberg that could sink their Titanic. I want off the boat before it sinks.
It's really hard to find a clear answer of what's going on too. After looking at their website [1] and a forum thread [2] it makes me think they're going to hold updates that would have gone into 'universe' hostage until you sign up for Ubuntu Pro.
The thing I really don't get is that I always assumed 'universe' was mainly driven by 3rd parties. Who's writing the security patches? I can't imagine Ubuntu is capable of doing that for +23k apps, so I'm guessing the maximum they're doing is packaging and the minimum is simply giving us a new repository name that's paid instead of free.
Plus, how does "best effort" work for LTS updates if the finished patch/update is already sitting in the ESM repo? There's not really any extra effort required to push those into another repository, so I think the support for 'universe' will become arbitrary.
My hunch is that 'universe' updates are going to cease to exist in Ubuntu if you're not paying for Ubuntu Pro. I have no definitive proof of that, but it's not clear what they're trying to do and I tend to assume the worst in those situations.
That forum thread feels like they're being intentionally vague about what they're trying to do which I don't like.
Can anyone here explain what's actually going on with updates in Ubuntu now?
Not the original poster, but I just had issues where normal operations of Ubuntu desktop (literally just installing updates after installing a new distribution) completely broke the OS - something crashed during apt update/upgrade and it nuked /var/lib/dpkg and all it’s data, which broke everything in a non recoverable way.
Could you be more specific? I upgraded from 20.04 to 22.04 without any issues.