As of yesterday, April 21st, Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish is available for download and upgrade.

If you are trying to install from the Software Updater from an earlier version of Ubuntu (I only use LTS ones, for example, and was on 20.04) you won’t be able to install it from the GUI (it will only start offering it once it moves to the 22.04.01 patch release), but you can easily do it from the command line:

sudo do-release-upgrade -d

The -d will tell Ubuntu that you’re just dandy with a “developer” release.

Once done the installation is done (and, no, it’s not really “unattended” – Ubuntu Installer will keep pestering you about stuff that has been modified and won’t clobber it for you – and rightly so!) I’ve found a couple of things need doing (I’ll keep updating the list here, as I discover more stuff).

important – Canonical (finally!) moved back to “horizontal” screen for multi-desktops (still controlled by Ctrl-Alt-arrow, it’s now left/right, instead of up/down). Maybe this has happened in the last couple of years and I’m finding out only now, but if you’re coming from an LTS release, that’s where it is.

Get rid of Firefox Snap

For reasons that escape me, Canonical *really* wants you to use snaps – I am not sure I fully understand the technology and/or the motivations, but the bottom line is, it doesn’t really work for me.

One of the major drawbacks, at any rate, is that the ExpressVPN extension doesn’t work in the snap-installed FFox (while it works just fine with the apt-installed one), and for me this is a deal-breaker.

Here is the guide as to how to replace it with an apt-installed one – took me only a few minutes, and works just fine (you’ll have to close this window for the uninstall to complete successfully, but please come back!)

Add yourself back to the sudoers group

The sudoers file is one of those that Ubuntu will ask you whether you want to keep your modified copy, or upgrade to a new one.

I knew exactly what were the changes that I’d done (made myself King of the Castle) while I had no idea what I could be missing out on by not having the newer version, so I was just fine with clobbering it.

The (predictable) outcome was that I had to enter my password every time I used sudo, which gets old really fast – this is the fix (note: do NOT listen to the intertubes and do NOT edit directly the sudoers file with visudo):

1. create a new file with the necessary incantations; and
2. move it into place.

$ cat <<EOF >$USER-rules
$USER ALL=(ALL:ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL
EOF

$ sudo mv $USER-rules /etc/sudoers.d/

You don’t even need to reboot and/or log out / back in; just open a new terminal window and enjoy a password-typing-less life.

Python is gone, long live Python 3

Python 2.7 is gone (at long last!) and with it the python command is gone too – by default, Jellyfish ships with Python 3.10 and the python3 command.

This however also means that any Python script with a shebang which does not explicitly asks for python3, will fail:

#!/usr/bin/env python

For now I am not adding a python alias, as I would rather find out what breaks and the fix is pretty trivial:

#!/usr/bin/env python3

(also, I suspect if the good Canonical folks haven’t either, they may have had their good reasons).

GTK App is broken

I am currently running into this issue:

Gtk-Message: 10:35:34.378: Failed to load module "xapp-gtk3-module"
[59365:0424/103535.976660:FATAL:gpu_data_manager_impl_private.cc(415)] GPU process isn't usable. Goodbye.

which is not related to something I’ve seen scrolling past (removal of the gir package) and has been mentioned elsewhere: I tried re-installing gir1.2-xapp-1.0, and the issue is still there.

When I find the fix, I’ll make sure to post it here; if you do know how to solve this, please post it in the comments section below.

So far, so awesome!!