That time Ubuntu’s Update Manager locked my Frontend while dpkg died in the background - leaving locks everywhere and blocking reboot
This post is half sysadmin note, half personal reminder. Every so often, Ubuntu’s desktop GUI based update process (Update Manager) will hang mid-upgrade -> the GNOME session stops responding, the display freezes, and it looks like a hard crash. But in reality, the underlying system is fine. You know this because the fans are spinning on full speed, the cursor is active, you can still SSH in (or switch to a TTY), ps shows a live process table, and systemd is dutifully blocking shutdowns because it’s protecting the package database. It’s one of those moments where you realize how much of the Ubuntu desktop is just thin layers on top of perfectly stable plumbing. What actually happens when Ubuntu “freezes” mid-update Ubuntu’s GUI update tool ( update-manager ) is basically a frontend to aptd , which itself manages a single long-lived dpkg session. That dpkg process owns a couple of locks under /var/lib/dpkg/lock* , and while those are held, systemd knows not to let you r...
