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Recently I wrote about the exact same subject, so you must be wondering why I am writing about that again so soon.

I really wanted my relationship with Linux to work given how abusive Microsoft has become, so I went and installed Kubuntu after deciding Debian can't get their shit together. I had the install running in an external NVME M.2 enclosure on a spare 1TB Samsung 970 Pro I had laying around.

I nuked snapd and flatpak right away, set up NVIDIA drivers and CUDA toolkit, tweaked kernel performance to feel as snappy as possible. I installed Brave manually and KeePassXC using Ubunut PPA, then added Steam and Proton, even installed and ran a game of Mass Effect 3 multiplayer. Everything was working great, and I even got some Windows apps like Total Commander to work using Wine. I added docker so I can run Ollama and keep it up-to-date. Then life and work interfered and I didn't use it for a while — until today.

What greeted me was a prompt to do an upgrade to 25.04 Plucky Puffin. I clicked Upgrade and I was met with a message that I have custom apt sources which won't be used and do I want to proceed. I did, and the upgrade started and then failed with error 32 when trying to install new grub. Then it told me my install is in a broken state and it needs to recover it.

Upgrade GUI ran dpkg --configure -a. That hung at 99%. I clicked on close button, nope, not responding. KDE asked me if I want to kill the python process that was running this GUI which was frozen and I agreed. It didn't close it. I went to terminal and manually killed all involved processes including said dpkg and then I re-run it which allowed me to see why it hung — grub was asking where to install itself and that prompt was suppressed in GUI upgrade.

In 2025 one would think asking this question is no longer necessary as dpkg knows which root filesystem it was ran from and which EFI partition is mounted. It doesn't even have to guess, and if it really has to ask then the OS upgrade GUI can't just fucking assume everyone uses a single bootable drive in their system and provide a means to pass the question up from dpkg to the user instead of hanging with no indication of what went wrong whatsoever.

After I fixed that problem I went to inspect what happened with my apt sources. Of course all custom sources were renamed to .migrate so they were deactivated. I fixed it all, did another round of upgrades and rebooted. And then I got a prompt to upgrade to 25.10.

At this point I was getting annoyed — if you know there's 25.10, why force me to go through 25.04 at all? I hate when software is wasting my time instead of letting me work with my PC, but I still wanted my system to be up-to-date so I clicked the dreaded Upgrade button again.

This time there were no errors, though it again warned me about custom apt sources which I dismissed as I expected I will be able to fix it. And this time I was wrong, as it just deleted my Brave Browser, Steam, and KeePassXC lists, not renamed them. But that's not the worst thing it did. It removed xorg, xinit, xinput, etc and after reboot I was greeted with text mode login. Congratulations, Kubuntu upgrade! You made my Linux desktop as secure as possible by making sure it doesn't run anymore.

Yes, I could've tried to fix it but I won't — to quote Commander Shepard "I'd rather drink a cup of acid after chewing on a razor blade."

TL;DR — when the core system component responsible for upgrading hoses your system so spectacularly that you lose graphical environment it is time to repeat the conclusion:

Despite Windows 10 EOL this ain't the year of Linux desktop, and judging by the experience I just had with a major distro like Kubuntu it is still perpetually a decade away, just like cold fusion, flying cars, and faster-than-light travel.