“If you try to upgrade in situ you’ll just end up with a shedload of things that won’t work properly”

I received a question this month from a reader (who wishes to remain anonymous) who is having lots of problems upgrading his Raspberry Pi 400 to the latest OS version. He’d tried to follow several websites advising on the steps needed, but had ended up with a Pi that kept giving configuration errors when trying to do stuff via the command line, and where the mouse had become very sluggish and kept overshooting when using the Raspberry Pi desktop. He wondered what the best course of action would be in this case.

First, there’s no need to feel bad about being in this situation. I’ve been there myself, including the sluggish mouse thing, which sometimes seems to happen when trying to upgrade from Buster (version 10) to Bullseye (version 11).

Unfortunately, there’s only one sure-fire way to recover from this and that’s to re-image the SD card in your Pi and start again from scratch. I know that’s a real pain, especially if you have lots of software installed on the machine, but it’s the only option when your Raspberry Pi goes haywire like this. Otherwise, if you try to upgrade in situ you’ll just end up with a shedload of things that won’t work properly and broken dependencies.

You’ll also have lots of pain when you try to do future updates.

For all that people complain about Windows Update, and to a lesser degree the update process on a Mac, in