Can not upgrade to 23.10 from 23.04

When running "update-manager -c -d" the update stops after it has downloaded new software. It gives error something went wrong and suggests it is a network error and try later. But trying later makes no difference. It keeps doing it.
If I use "update-manager -c" there is no suggested upgrade. Which I assume means the new 23.10 is a development release and not yet deemed stable or ???

Hello sorta guessing do you have When there are other updates set this way.
In my UM22.04.3 from command line typing update-manager -c is just checking for new release and also updating system. Image shows both ways tried.
Here is page on update-manager:
update-manager

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No I have it set to "For any new version" and it works when I use the flag -d. However it never gets any longer than download all the software except maybe for the last two of 183 links then crashes...

The error message says:
"A problem occurred during the update. This is usually some sort of network problem, please check your network connection and retry."

Actually, this sounds to me like this is caused by some PPAs that you have installed. Often, some software developer will tell you to install their software by running a series of (usually two) commands that include apt-add-repository or some similar command. These commands tell APT to look for software not only on the official Ubuntu package servers, but also on the third-party software developer's server. Usually, PPAs are either for proprietary software or for cutting-edge versions of open-source software. In the former case, a PPA is necessary because Ubuntu won't include most proprietary software in their repositories; in the latter case, Ubuntu tends to test software for a while before including it in their official repositories, so the version that you get from the repositories may not be the latest version. Discord, Skype, and Zoom are examples of the former; Wine is a good example of the latter.

To test my hypothesis, try running the command sudo apt update. Look at the output from that, and first see if there are any error messages. If there are any error messages, and they include a reference to a URL that is not of the form https://archive.ubuntu.com or similar, then your upgrade "failure" was most likely just a failure to upgrade the PPAs. Check each PPA vendor's website to ensure that they even provide PPAs for Ubuntu 23.04; you might have to change one or more files under /etc/apt/sources.list.d or the main /etc/apt/sources.list file itself. If you do need to change those files, in general you should look for any instance of 23.04, 23-04, or lunar and replace it with 23.10, 23-10, or mantic (respectively).

I would include more details, but unfortunately I haven't used Ubuntu for a great many months now (my computer is so old that Ubuntu fills much of the 4 GB of RAM I have just by booting up); I am mostly a Debian user now, and I have a religious policy of not installing any PPAs under any circumstances anyway. Nevertheless, I hope that gets the ball rolling -- maybe @tkn or someone else with more Ubuntu experience can lend you more insight and more detailed advice?

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Yes indeed, you hit the nail on the head.
23.10 is not an official release yet.
It is planned to be released at the end of this month.
(2023/10)

Besides the fact that 23.10 is still in 'beta' state, there can be all kinds of reasons why a do-release-upgrade -cd can fail.

First of all: @gordon's advice is, as usual, gold.

I'll try to expand it a bit to ubuntu specific commands.

PPA's are not a problem as long as they don't override regular packages: the upgrader disables all PPA's before upgrading (but AFAIK it doesn't roll back the PPA installed packages to the official versions (please dear fellow readers, correct me if i'm wrong)).

Best thing to try is to remove the PPA's by using

sudo ppa-purge ppa:whatever/ppa

(ofcourse replace whatever with the name of the PPA you want to remove)

which, according to the documentation, automagically rolls back to the official packages and removes the PPA.

If all goes well, then try to update and upgrade again.

sudo apt-get clean && sudo apt-get autoremove && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade && sudo do-release-upgrade -cd

Again, there are numerous potential reasons why your system won't upgrade. I just touched, as @gordon already stated, the most probable cause.

The other cause can be that you customized your system (on system level, not on user level) a bit too much so that it deviates more than the do-release-upgrade command can handle. In that case, the only way forward is a clean install.

Illustrative Note: I do have experienced botched system upgrades in the past so you're not the only one and not the first to encounter shenenigans like this. If all else fails: backup your /home directory and do a fresh install :slight_smile:

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Hi, @scanex (allan nielsen) :slight_smile:

(Usual disclaimer: please note that I'm just another Forum user here, I'm NOT an Ubuntu Developer and/or Ubuntu MATE Developer).

Besides the good answers that @tkn and @gordon have already given you in this topic, I suspect (although I may be wrong) there may be an additional issue that is preventing you (and probably other people) from upgrading from Ubuntu MATE 23.04 ("Lunar Lobster") to Ubuntu MATE 23.10 ("Mantic Minotaur"). Specifically, in the Official "Ubuntu Community Hub" / "Ubuntu Community Discourse" - https://discourse.ubuntu.com/ - there is the following "Mantic Minotaur (23.10) Release Status Tracking" topic:

In that topic, one can find, among other useful information, the following excerpt:

" (...) Current blockers for enabling upgrades

That is a link to "Bug #2034986 “some text became unreadable during a distribution upgrade” : Bugs : ubuntu-release-upgrader package : Ubuntu" - https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-release-upgrader/+bug/2034986 - that relates to a problem that was also mentioned here in the "Ubuntu MATE Community", specifically at the end of the following post by @jmarkus (Jim) in the "Ubuntu MATE 23.10 testing" discussion topic:

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