You have to add a flag to get off of the LTS brach, Maybe '-d"? Both 16.04 and 180.04 are LTS. the next LTS will be 20.04

Thanks, but nope that's not the issue, I've already done both. It's just failing to do anything for some reason.

  $ do-release-upgrade -p -c
  Checking for a new Ubuntu release
  New release '18.10' available.
  Run 'do-release-upgrade' to upgrade to it.

I'm not sure if do-release-upgrade supports skipping releases, except for going from lts to lts? In other words, it might either: 16.04 -> 18.04 -> 20.04, or 18.04 -> 18.10 -> 19.04. But not 18.04 (lts) -> 19.04?

I think it should: https://askubuntu.com/a/240189

Actually, that answer seems to imply that "skipping" is just for lts>lts?

I guess so. In my case I'm not skipping anything. It's set to normal and clearly trying to get 18.10.

Ah, I missed your original comment. I see you hit a bug with missing depencies.

IIRC, do-release-upgrade won't upgrade between LTS releases until the .2 release.

Yup but I've already turned off the LTS setting.

Sorry, brain fart – you have to upgrade between non-LTS releases sequentially, as far as I know there's no supported way to upgrade to 19.04 from anything but 18.10. (in general, to get to release n, you must either be on release n-1, or n must be an LTS and you must be on the previous LTS.)

Yeah but that's what it's trying to do too, and that's exactly what's failing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19693284

Sorry, totally missed that. Looks like some other people have had similar issues with upgrading to previous versions: https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues/3489 (though the issue is for (I think) 16.04->18.04, someone mentions that it also affects 18.04->18.10)

it's strange that that's all the output you get, though. Apparently it puts logs in /var/log/dist-upgrade/, is there more there?

AHH, thank you! /var/log/dist-upgrade/main.log explains why! It's indeed another instance of a bug I already saw when upgrading another system [1] and couldn't figure out -- there's a missing dependency in some Ubuntu package:

  sudo apt-get install python-distro-info python3-distro-info

EDIT: Do yourself a favor and don't upgrade to 19.04 on WSL. VSCode and google-chrome-stable can't start on it. I had to roll back.

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-release-upg...