Pop OS broken after clicking the OS upgrade download button

[brintal]

I was a bit naive in thinking that the "Download" button actually just downloads the update.
Well after clicking the button my OS is pretty much fried.
I had the same issue as described here #256
with the difference that the command sudo apt install ppp=2.4.7-2+4.1ubuntu8 libnm0=1.30.0-1ubuntu3 didn't resolve my issue.
Getting the following now:

─$ sudo apt full-upgrade                                                                                       100 ↵
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Error!
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 pop-desktop : Depends: pop-session but it is not going to be installed
               Depends: chrome-gnome-shell but it is not going to be installed
               Depends: gdm3 but it is not going to be installed
               Depends: gnome-shell but it is not going to be installed
               Depends: pop-default-settings but it is not going to be installed
               Recommends: gnome-calendar but it is not going to be installed
               Recommends: gnome-contacts but it is not going to be installed
               Recommends: gnome-weather but it is not going to be installed
               Recommends: io.elementary.sideload but it is not installable
               Recommends: gnome-remote-desktop but it is not going to be installed
               Recommends: gnome-shell-extension-prefs but it is not going to be installed
E: Error, pkgProblemResolver::Resolve generated breaks, this may be caused by held packages.

So very similar to #256 (comment) but that issue is closed now for some reason.

can anyone help? I really don't feel like reinstalling my whole machine. thanks in advance.

[jacobgkau]

I was a bit naive in thinking that the "Download" button actually just downloads the update.

This confusion has been brought up in #254.

Can you please walk us through the exact sequence you took until the error message that you showed? Did you click Download one time, or have you tried it multiple times? Did you attempt to close the window/cancel the upgrade after downloading, or did it fail on its own? Do you remember the error message that the GUI showed the first time that it failed?

can anyone help? I really don't feel like reinstalling my whole machine. thanks in advance.

First, if you are able to boot into the Recovery partition (hold spacebar during boot) and perform a Refresh Install, that will preserve your home directory while resetting the rest of the system (including the package manager and all system-wide packages) to default. That's the quickest way to recover from this situation. If your Recovery partition is on 21.10 (which it should be, since that's the first thing that happens when you click Download for the upgrade), this process will even complete the upgrade so you don't have to attempt it again. (If you're using a legacy BIOS computer and don't have a Recovery partition, then you can also do this from a USB live disk.)

If you can't perform a Refresh Install for some reason:

If you are a System76 customer, you can open a support ticket for one-on-one assistance. Otherwise, it might be easier if you join the ~upgrade-help channel on the Pop!_OS Mattermost chat, because it can take a decent amount of back-and-forth if you don't know what you're looking for. The basic steps to troubleshoot will be:

1. Run cat /etc/os-release and sudo apt update and use the outputs to determine whether your system is mostly on 21.04 or 21.10.
2. Run apt policy pop-desktop pop-session chrome-gnome-shell gdm3 gnome-shell pop-default-settings to try and determine what packages have an incorrect version installed.
3. Download and install the correct versions of those packages until apt is no longer giving any error messages.

In addition to all output from the above troubleshooting steps, the output of the following commands might also be helpful to see what might have caused the issue:

cat /etc/apt/sources.list
ls -alh /etc/apt/sources.list.d
cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/*
cat /var/log/apt/history.log

And for a list of all packages installed on your system, as well as pop-upgrade's logs:

apt list --installed > packages.txt
sudo journalctl -u pop-upgrade > pop-upgrade-log.txt

[padraicbc]

Changing any reference of hirsute to impish in the sources lists worked for me after I had upgraded to 21.10 from 21.04. I could then do a run apt full-upgrade then successfully upgrade to 22.04 with pop-upgrade release upgrade. Without that I had similar dep issues.