This is a bit of a major woopsie. The upgrade path for the latest Ubuntu 25.04 release has been pulled offline, as it has resulted in Kubuntu users seeing a broken desktop.
What you end up with is a weird looking login screen, and nothing seems to work.
Picture credit: @dimspace.xyz on Bluesky
I actually encountered this bug during the Beta, thinking I had done something wrong or not paid enough attention. Turns out, it was a real genuine major bug. I probably should have reported it, but I'm always doing multiple things at the same time and quite overworked right now. So, uh, feel free to blame me I guess? Developers can't fix stuff they don't know about — woops.
Writing on Reddit in replies to posts about the problem, Simon Quigley the Lubuntu Release Manager, wrote:
Here's what's going on with this, because yeah, there's something going on.
It's my fault personally, sorry folks.
So, when you go to upgrade from Kubuntu 24.10 to 25.04, the actual installer is grabbed as a tarball from the archive.
In other words, Kubuntu 25.04's upgrader is used to upgrade to 25.04, from 24.10.
Well, I ported it to PyQt6 this cycle. A few weeks before release, I was pinged with someone notifying me that Kubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, and Lubuntu didn't actually come with pyqt6 installed.
Literally, installing pyqt6 should fix your issue, for now. If you run into actual issues with the Kubuntu install after upgrade, I'm much more concerned.
We have a fix, in the queue. Waiting. Sitting. We had the release today. I'm surprised people are able to upgrade already, and if someone already enabled the upgrades without checking with me... I'm going to be unhappy, to say the least.
Some cross training is happening, we're working it out. For now, this was me, sorry about that folks.
And then in a follow-up post:
Hi folks, just a quick update on the latest.
Yes, 25.04 upgrades are broken beyond just adding pyqt6 as a dependency. While I had something to do with it, there's a much greater issue at play that we don't know about yet.
From everything I can possibly read, enabling upgrades this early was a genuine mistake not found in code review. I have done everything in my power to slam the brakes on the upgrades, not just for Kubuntu, but for everyone. All ten flavors, plus Desktop, and Server.
Yes, I personally pushed the code change disabling those upgrades. It required one more manual step, and now it's deployed.
As of about 20 minutes ago, I've passed off to the official Ubuntu Release Team who will now drive this to completion. The change I made was to mark Plucky as unsupported temporarily, which will halt the upgrades, with a POSSIBLE side effect of an end of life popup, on your Plucky machine.
Ignore the popup, it was just the quickest solution to throw a wrench in the gears.
I'm genuinely sorry about this. On behalf of Ubuntu, on behalf of Kubuntu, and on behalf of my own flavor, Lubuntu. This is unacceptable, and I will be persistent in making sure our processes become better.
I'm going to try to go to sleep now. This thread is what alerted me that there's a wider issue, specifically. So, thank you all.
We'll be better. If you need help picking up the pieces, yes, we have support channels for basically everything. The best thing is to just make sure the kubuntu-desktop package is already installed.
I hope you can also understand my position. I have never worked for Canonical, I work for Altispeed Technologies. Please go support the Ask Noah Show, Noah is the one who made sure I had enough coffee to survive this thing.
Accidents and bugs happen, hopefully some lessons will be learned from all sides on this. Just goes to show, Beta releases are vital to pick up bugs…if they're reported.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
scaine a day ago
I always assumed Simon was part of Canonical. Such a big community around all this, I'm kind of surprised something like this doesn't happen more often. Test, test and test again, I suppose.
R Daneel Olivaw a day ago
Ehvis a day ago
benstor214 23 hours ago
Ehvis 23 hours ago
Is this sddm not finding the config file? I had something similar a while ago.
No. All KDE packages get uninstalled. Including the SDDM themes, so it has nothing to display.
M@GOid 21 hours ago
tuxisagamer 21 hours ago
sudoer 19 hours ago
Kubuntu has been in constant decline since at least 23.04, (basically it's been like that since the main maintainer left and did KDE Neon with more people leaving constantly I assume) I wouldn't recommend it. Just look at all the upgrade problems emerging with 25.04 and all the mispackaging issues and misconfigurations since 24.04. Personally I couldn't enable video hardware acceleration with Chromium only in 25.04 beta but I could basically everywhere else, OpenMandriva, Fedora, Elementary and what not. If you want KDE from the so-called "mainstream" distros, Fedora KDE edition is most probably the better and more professional choice.
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/04/ubuntu-25-04-plucky-puffin-is-out-now/comment_id=277967
Last edited by sudoer on 19 Apr 2025 at 11:55 am UTC
Talon1024 18 hours ago
Last edited by Talon1024 on 19 Apr 2025 at 12:32 am UTC
Eike 12 hours ago
I learned from Windows to always do a fresh install. This is why I would never be affected by something like this.
I didn't apply what I learned from Windows bugs to Linux and I'm happyly upgrading my Debian installation most of the times for 25 years.
Fear thou not.
Last edited by Eike on 19 Apr 2025 at 9:19 am UTC
Liam Dawe 10 hours ago
To say it politely, KDE is not ready for prime time. It is feature-bloated and full of half-baked features. Ubuntu is learning their lesson now. Fedora will learn their lesson later. Cosmic has done in mere months what KDE has tried and failed for 30 years to do.
To say it not so politely: Stop spreading bullshit. There are numerous people who like the feature-rich Plasma-desktop (including me), and most of its features are decidedly *not* half-baked. The transition to Plasma 6 was exceptionally smooth, in my experience. The general OS-Upgrades every half year have been rock-solid for me for many years now. Bugs like these are unfortunate, but Plasma isn't the first nor the last to experience something like that on occasion.
And please stop comparing companies with a clear vision (and no need to wait for decisions by numerous people, plus the ability to *pay* their employees to do work) with a community of mostly volunteers that usually don't get paid for their hard work. Doing so is either disingenuous or it shows that you have no clue what you're talking about.
Having said that, I did experience the bug, and for those who struggle with it: Just switch to a TTY and reinstall the plasma-desktop, but using apt, that problem was solved in a few minutes. After that, one can reboot, enter their password and go on installing the rest of the default apps via the GUI.
It's far from a catastrophe, as the system is still booting, just with Plasma removed.
sudoer 7 hours ago
To say it politely, KDE is not ready for prime time. It is feature-bloated and full of half-baked features. Ubuntu is learning their lesson now. Fedora will learn their lesson later. Cosmic has done in mere months what KDE has tried and failed for 30 years to do.
I mean sometimes I feel like trolling a bit too, but you 've gone full *******
Last edited by sudoer on 19 Apr 2025 at 12:00 pm UTC
iwantlinuxgames 4 hours ago
boot from a live USB. once at a desktop open a Konsole terminal.
mkdir target
sudo su
mount -o bind /dev target/dev
mount -o bind /proc target/proc
mount -o bind /sys target/sys
cp /etc/resolv.conf target/etc/
chroot target
once you're in the chroot at the propmpt you can run
sudo apt install plasma-desktop
let it do it's thing and reboot.
Caldathras 4 hours ago
I guess I should say thanks to early adopters, though, as they are the ones who identify those kinks.
------
That being said, I was testing Kubuntu's major upgrade feature in a VM a while back. After the second upgrade, I could only login to KDE in Wayland mode. Xorg would cause Plasma to lock up and crash. So, not the first time the upgrade tool buggered things up ...
Last edited by Caldathras on 19 Apr 2025 at 3:24 pm UTC
mr-victory 3 hours ago
tmtvl 3 hours ago
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