Are you on the previous LTS version of Ubuntu Studio and can't upgrade to the latest one? You are not alone. As explained in the section of su Blog, there are many users who, when trying to upload Ubuntu Studio 24.04 Since 22.04, they have not been able to make the jump. The problem seems to be related to a conflict between PipeWire and PulseAudio, audio servers that are used in one LTS and the other.
Changes are often made for the better, but sometimes they are the root of these problems. It may also have something to do with the jump that is intended to be made from one LTS version to another.: While normal or "provisional" versions go up every six months, if we want to jump between LTSs, the same will happen over a period of two years. A more aggressive update that, while it is true that it waits a while to be activated, it is also true that the change can be very large.
PipeWire and PulseAudio conflict in Ubuntu Studio 24.04 and 22.04
Affected users can report the bug on the bug page 2078639, available on the project Launchpad. They are also following the 2078608, and 2079817, leaving aside many others that appear to be duplicates. But this would not solve the problem.
The thing is that for most Ubuntu flavors in 24.04, the idea was that PipeWire would replace PulseAudio as the primary audio server, and the former should be forced to be installed. The developers of the Ubuntu studio version wanted to do it differently: would use PipeWire by default, but PulseAudio could be used if the user wanted to keep the classic server. This meant that PipeWire had to be a soft dependency rather than a hard one so that it could be uninstalled by metapackages without breaking the entire system.
This ultimately caused the software that had to handle updates to get confused when figuring out how to perform the update, and that's the problem. Ubuntu Studio is currently working with the Ubuntu Foundation Team to try to get this to work. ubuntu-release-upgrader force installation of PipeWire for Ubuntu Stuio without the operating system requiring a strong dependency on PipeWire.
Probably not possible
It is possible and even the problem probably has no solution. If this were to happen, the possibility of not supporting upgrades from Ubuntu Studio 22.04 to Ubuntu Studio 24.04 is raised. The other option would be to create a strong dependency or hard from PipeWire, thus eliminating the possibility of returning to PulseAudio.
On a personal level, I would recommend doing a clean installUpdating is the easiest way to go, but sometimes bugs creep in. By installing the operating system from scratch we ensure that everything will work as designed.
Second problematic change in a few years
With this one they would be two problematic changes that Ubuntu Studio has had in just a few years. In 2020 they decided Switch from Xfce to KDE, an idea that even a die-hard KDE user finds heartbreaking. Yes, KDE performs well and is my favorite desktop, and yes, I prefer it, but backwards compatibility was broken. So, you had to do a clean install, and if you had important projects on your hard drive, you either uploaded them from a backup or you lost everything.
Now this change has arrived in PipeWire, which while it is certainly a look into the future and a logical step, is also causing headaches for Ubuntu Studio users.
On the bright side, both changes have already been made, and I can't think of a third one that could be annoying again. There are times when it's not easy to move forward, and this is something we'll also see in Rolling Release distributions like Arch Linux.
If you have been affected, we hope that everything will be resolved soon and you can continue enjoying your favorite flavor of Ubuntu.