Switching proprietary drivers on a not up-to-date system breaks it badly

[Michael Zanetti]

When a system is not fully up to date, mainly when there's a kernel update available, software-properties-gtk still allows to switch drivers, for example switching between nvidia drivers.

Doing so will cause it to update the kernel, but not do a full upgrade. After the operation software-properties-gtk will suggest to reboot the machine and most likely cause the user to just do so.

The problem with that is that linux-modules-extras will not be installed now and after the reboot the user is left with a broken system: Non-functioning graphics (well, llvmpipe still does if lucky) and what's even worse, no network drivers and depending on the machine maybe even without input device support. This will cause the user to require a second machine and a USB stick (and quite some knowledge) to recover the system.

I've ran into this a couple of times now, seems reproducible. It is quite tricky to get out of this which IMO makes this a somewhat critical bug.