An issue has been identified

The Ubuntu Release team has now enabled upgrades from 25.04 to 25.10! This is great news! In fact, you may have noticed this icon on your toolbar and a notification to upgrade.

However, upon doing so, you may have noticed something a little more unfortunate:

Yep, we know. This tells you nothing about what is wrong. What is wrong is slightly more technical. As it turns out, the backend application that actually performs the upgrade removed an argument from its command line unannounced during the Plucky Puffin release cycle, approximately a year ago.

As our project leader, Erich Eickmeyer, maintains the upgrade notifier widget for both Ubuntu Studio and Kubuntu, he woke up and immediately got to work identifying what’s wrong and how to patch the Plasma widget in question to correctly execute the upgrade process. He has uploaded the fix, and it was accepted by a member of the Ubuntu Stable Release Updates team.

At the moment, the fix needs to be tested and verified. In order to test it, one must install the fix from the plucky-proposed repository. In order for it to be available, it must build for all architectures and, as of this writing, is awaiting building on riscv64 which has a 40-hour backlog.

The Workaround

If you wish to begin the upgrade process manually rather than waiting on the upgrade notifier fix to be implemented, feel free to make sure you are fully updated, type alt-space to execute Krunner, and paste this:

do-release-upgrade -f DistUpgradeViewKDE

This is the exact command that will be executed by the notifier widget as soon as it is updated.

Of course, if you’re in no hurry, feel free to wait until the notifier is updated and use that method. Do bear in mind, though, that as of this writing, you have exactly 90 days to perform the upgrade to 25.10 before your system will no longer be supported. At that time, you’ll risk being unable to upgrade at all unless certain procedures for End-Of-Life Upgrades are done, which can be tedious for those uncomfortable in a command line as it will require modifying system files.

Mea Culpa

We do apologize for the inconvenience. Testing upgrade paths like this are hard to do and things go missed, especially when teams don’t communicate with each other. We’re try to identify things before they happen but, unfortunately, certain items cannot be foreseen.

This issue has now been added to the Ubuntu Studio 25.10 Release Notes.