Hiya,
I’ve been meaning to switch off of Debian for a while but I’m intimidated by fear of having a worse experience and my only PC (work and personal) being out of action until I get it sorted. Maybe the time has come to take my current distro behind the woodshed.
I updated from Debian 12 to 13 yesterday, following the instructions here: https://www.linuxlookup.com/howto/upgrade_debian_12_debian_13
The last step fails, and I assume that’s why I’m now in trouble.
$ sudo apt modernize-sources
E: Invalid operation modernize-sources
Searching for “Invalid operation modernize-sources” gives me literally zero results from DDG.
After reboot I opened KDE Discover and checked for updates - there are 2,000+. Yeesh. OK. I haven’t found one that will actually update, presumably because the sources are wrong? I get different errors.
For example, updating the Clock (I can’t believe the clock needs updating) auto-selects some other packages, I assume dependencies. Many minutes later I get the error:
The PackageKit daemon has crashed:
The PackageKit daemon has crashed
Firefox doesn’t select any other options, but fails quickly with:
Dependency resolution failed:<br/><br/>The following packages have unmet dependencies:
libreoffice-core: Depends: libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0-0 (>= 1.0.0) but it is not going to be installed
Recommends: gstreamer1.0-plugins-base but it is not going to be installed
Recommends: gstreamer1.0-plugins-good but it is not going to be installed
Recommends: gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly but it is not going to be installed
Recommends: gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad but it is not going to be installed
Recommends: gstreamer1.0-libav but it is not going to be installed
Is this worth fixing? Is it a sign to finally kill my Debian and try something new?
A kind lemming suggested Nixos and was persuasive, but my reading indicates that’s more for sysadmins deploying systems than for a bearded guy in his home office with one PC.
I just want my computer to work…
There shouldn’t be any updates available after doing a full upgrade. Maybe you forgot one of the
apt full-upgradesteps. That should have upgraded apt to give you new options. So just do that.I’d also use the official documentation. https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/release-notes/upgrading.en.html
The last step fails, and I assume that’s why I’m now in trouble.
$ sudo apt modernize-sources E: Invalid operation modernize-sources
Not sure about the error but I kind of doubt modernize-sources would make/break your upgrade. I did a clean full install of Debian 13 and the sources file wasn’t even modernized on that, it’s still the old version. Would be very surprised if somehow sources is following a different requirement for a Debian 13 upgrade.
From the error maybe your version of apt doesn’t support the “modernize-sources” option… but that itself isn’t relevant to your Debian upgrade.
