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Lexible
Asked: 2020-04-24 08:51:25 +0800 CST

How can I upgrade Ubuntu from 19.10 to 20.04 without losing packages?

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When I upgraded from 18.10 to 19.04, and again when I upgraded from 19.04 to 19.10, I had to manually reinstall all of the packages I installed through dpkg, apt, etc. (I do not recall the precise details of how I went about either upgrade.) Is there a less painful route to upgrade Ubuntu 19.10 to 20.04?

Closely related: When I was a macOS user and upgraded my system software, I could export a list of installed Mac Ports, and then reinstall after the system upgrade using that exported list. Is there a similar kind of functionality for dpkg or apt? I would find this kind of solution to be "less painful" in case there is not a simple and direct way to accomplish an upgrade to 20.04 without losing installed packages. :)

upgrade 20.04

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Before proceeding you can save the list of installed packages by using

    dpkg -l | grep ^ii | awk '{print $2}' > dpkg-l_installed.txt
dpkg --get-selections > dpkg--get-selections.txt

    As usual the ordinary GUI method would be 

    update-manager -d # '-d' because of 20.04 is just released today

    or use terminal based method

    sudo do-release-upgrade -d

    The PPAs and third-party repositories will be disabled as usual, other stuff will remain.

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  2. I don't know if such functionality exists in ubuntu.

    Provided your terminal history span across a sufficient (read: long enough) periode of time, You could always browse your terminal history and spot all the packages you installed using apt:

    sudo cat .bash_history | grep "apt install"
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  3. This might work: open the update center in Ubuntu and then check for updates. If it asks you if you want to update to 20.04 select yes and you shouldn't (I'm not sure) lose any packages (although some packages might become obsolete). I highly recommend backing up your data to an external drive regardless. Déjà Dup is a fantastic tool.

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