A learning moment

First things first; old me was an idiot. Not me now, old me. The guy of about two years ago. He had no clue, and installed Ubuntu on my primary laptop. All was well and good until last night when, horror of horrors! I couldn't update the 24.04 LTS installed on the laptop to Ubuntu 26.04.1 which was all shiny and had been released earlier.

This was not good; I must have shiny (ok, so not-that-long-ago-me was also a bit of an idiot).

It turns out that the hint was right in front of my eyes all the time (the laptop was booting). During boot, the splash screen said "Ubuntu Unity". And all was good; I used the laptop like that for a while, and I liked Linux. But, as it turns out, Ubuntu Unity very much isn't the Ubuntu Desktop which the 26.04.1 LTS release needs to be upgraded from. Whilst old me (the older me, the real idiot) liked the idea of a "Unity" desktop, it turns out that this isn't on the mainstream LTS track, and so newer-old-me (the shiny hunter) got very confused, very quickly.

I mean, I was running Ubuntu for goodness sake, why won't it update?

Well, at least I now know (and so do you, dear reader). Be careful what you install...

I'm just restoring the backup now and hoping nothing breaks. In the meantime, I have to use this dreadful purple-by-default terminal. There doesn't seem to be much point in customising it all before the backup's restored...

Wish me luck!