How to Upgrade Ubuntu 20.04 to Ubuntu 20.10

In this tutorial, we will show you how to upgrade from Ubuntu 20.04 to Ubuntu 20.10. For those of you who didn’t know, Ubuntu 20.10 released, codenamed “Groovy Gorilla”; bringing yet another version of a remarkable operating system in the Ubuntu ecosystem, with the latest and some of the greatest open source technologies in a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution.

Note that Ubuntu 20.04 is a long-term support (LTS) release, which will be supported for 5 years. Ubuntu 20.10 is a non-LTS release, which means it will be supported for 9 months only, until July 2021. If you prefer stability over bleeding edge, then stick with Ubuntu 20.04.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step upgrade from Ubuntu 20.04 (focal Fossa) to Ubuntu 20.10 (Groovy Gorilla).

Prerequisites

• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Upgrade Ubuntu 20.04 to Ubuntu 20.10

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt commands in the terminal.

sudo apt update
sudo apt dist-upgrade

Step 2. Upgrade Ubuntu 20.10 (Focal Fossa to Groovy Gorilla).

If you want to upgrade to Ubuntu 20.10 Groovy Gorilla from Ubuntu 20.04, do the following steps one by one:

sudo apt install update-manager-core
sudo do-release-upgrade -d
sudo apt update && apt upgrade

After the installation is successful, remove previously pre-installed software which is no longer included in the latest release using the following command:

sudo apt autoremove --purge

Congratulations! You have successfully upgraded Ubuntu. Thanks for using this tutorial for an upgrade Ubuntu 20.10 (Focal Fossa to Groovy Gorilla) system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Ubuntu website.