Objective
The objective is to downgrade an Ubuntu system to its previous version.
Requirements
Privileged access to your Ubuntu System as root or via sudo command is required.
Difficulty
Possibly HARD ( not recommended )
Conventions
- # – requires given linux commands to be executed with root privileges either directly as a root user or by use of
sudocommand - $ – given linux commands to be executed as a regular non-privileged user
Instructions
Most of the time it is safer and recommended to invest time to troubleshoot your current issues with the upgraded system or reinstall the entire system instead of hoping that the Ubuntu downgrade makes your problems go away. You have been warned!
The Ubuntu system downgrade procedure is relatively straightforward. The trouble only may arise during and after the system downgrade. In this guide, we will be downgrading Ubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish to Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver.
Downgrade sources.list
First step is to downgrade sources list file to the previous version. In our example we are downgrading from Ubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish to Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver hence we need to change every occurrence of codename cosmic to bionic. Yo can either use your favorite text editor to do this task or simply automate it by use of the sed command:
$ sudo sed -i 's/cosmic/bionic/g' /etc/apt/sources.list
Pin packages
Since our current installation contains higher version packages then the one we aim to downgrade to we need to pin the apt package manager to previous version packages.
To do so edit the /etc/apt/preferences file and enter the following content while replacing the codename of the system codename you aim to downgrade to. In our case we are downgrading to bionic:
Package: * Pin: release a=bionic Pin-Priority: 1001
Downgrade Ubuntu system
All should be now ready to perform Ubuntu system downgrade. To do so execute the following commands:
$ sudo apt update $ sudo apt upgrade $ sudo apt dist-upgrade
