Before they make memes illegal here too, I’ll post this:

Now that that’s out of the way – this morning, I was doing an upgrade to my Ubuntu system, and everything seemed to be going well. As a guide, I was following this article: How to Upgrade To Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Bionic Beaver

I started with the command:

$ sudo apt-install update-manager-core

Afterwards, I followed up with:

$ sudo do-release upgrade

This didn’t work, and I believe the issue was that the release wasn’t available yet. So, here’s where my big mistake happened. I attempted to force the upgrade by entering:

$ sudo do-release upgrade -d

This was where I clearly screwed up, because afterward, I was unable to get past the login screen on my system. Well, let me take that back – I could get past it, but all I would see is a blank desktop, very similar to this:

Interestingly, some other users on Ask Ubuntu have had similar issues:

Fortunately, another user on that same site had a good solution. He suggested opening the GRUB menu and selecting the previous kernel. This sounds like my best option. If I did actually lose all my data, thankfully there wasn’t anything irreplaceable there.

It’s funny – I have times when I can do all these advanced coding-related things, and yet something simple like this will put me out of commission.

You can’t keep a good man down, though!