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2025

  • 1 min read

How to upgrade Ubuntu without their upgrade tool

The problem

The heart of the problem is that sometimes when you try to upgrade ubuntu the upgrade fails. This happened to me when trying to upgrade to plucky (25.04). The tool would just fail and I tried to waiting it out hoping that ubuntu will solve the bug. No such luck. Finally I decided to upgrade it myself manually and it worked like a charm.

The solution

Sync up

The first thing you need to do is sync up with the previous release:

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt dist-upgrade

Disable third party repos

The next thing is to manially disable any non ubuntu source of packages from /etc/apt/sources.list.d. I usually just create a folder called /etc/apt/sources.list.moved and move all but ubuntu there.

Setup the ubuntu source to the new distribution

update /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ubuntu.sources to the following content (replace your distro name):

Enabled: yes
Types: deb
URIs: http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu
Suites: plucky plucky-updates plucky-security plucky-backports
Components: main restricted universe multiverse
Architectures: amd64
Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/ubuntu-archive-keyring.gpg

Upgrade and solve all issues

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt dist-upgrade

You will need to solve issues along the way but they are standard things.

Reboot

And that's it.

  • 1 min read

Move from Google-Chrome to Firefox on Linux

The problems of Google-Chrome

There are several issues with Google-Chrome, some specific to Linux some not

  • Google-Chrome is spying on you and sends way too much information to google and advertisers.
  • Google-Chrome is using way too much CPU on Linux and it's responsiveness is much worse than that of Firefox. I've actually seen this in actual touch typing sites.
  • Google-Chrome is writing too much and wears out your disk in Linux. This is a known issue https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/438456/google-chrome-high-i-o-writes

The result of all of this is that I recommend Firefox on Linux rather than Google-Chrome.

I wrote a script called browser_move_to_firefox.sh where you can see all the configs that need to be changed when moving to a different browser.

  • 2 min read

Problems with Netflix web and Netflix webos clients

I've had some issues with the Netflix service recently.

Here is my grievance list:

  • The UI is too intrusive, starts preview of videos/shows when you are just browsing. Cannot turn this behaviour off. Video plays from the start even though it clearly shows that the video is in mid viewing. Very annoying since I have to find the right position again.
  • Items disappear from “My List” with no heads up warning. Very annoying. This is sometimes because Netflix remove shows from the platform which is also annoying and what’s more – they don’t clearly state what is going to go away and when inside the app. I have to go online and find out for myself.
  • Things disappear from the “Continue watching as…” list with no heads up. Very annoying and forces me to maintain my own list of stuff I’m in the middle of watching. Sometimes this happens because a show is going off the platform (again, no heads up) and sometimes for no apparent reason at all.
  • The UI does not allow me to store more than one list. I need one for things I’ve seen and for things I want to see as well as things I’m in the middle of seeing (see above why Netflix support for studd you are in the middle of watching is terrible).
  • The site doesn’t provide an API for getting your data from Netflix. This may be a problem shared by a small minority of programming inclined users but it is important to me.

These problems are endemic to Netflix in general not just to a certain Netflix app or it’s website, so they cannot be solved at the application level. Netflix really needs to fix core issues to make progress on any of these issues.

As a result of all this I decided to leave Netflix. Bye bye.