Upgrade from bionic to focal broke for this system which has chrony installed. After do-release-upgrade exited (warning that the system was in an indeterminate state) I was unable to fix the system initially. It seemed that systemd-timesyncd was somehow interacting badly with chrony: $ sudo apt --fix-broken install Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Correcting dependencies... Done The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required: libboost-filesystem1.65.1 libboost-iostreams1.65.1 libboost-system1.65.1 libcwidget3v5 libip4tc2 libnspr4 libnss3 python3.6 python3.6-minimal Use 'sudo apt autoremove' to remove them. The following additional packages will be installed: libboost-iostreams1.71.0 libcwidget4 libxapian30 Suggested packages: libcwidget-dev xapian-tools The following packages will be REMOVED: chrony The following NEW packages will be installed: libboost-iostreams1.71.0 libcwidget4 The following packages will be upgraded: libxapian30 1 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 1 to remove and 439 not upgraded. 2 not fully installed or removed. Need to get 0 B/1204 kB of archives. After this operation, 3022 kB of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue? [Y/n] (Reading database ... 171920 files and directories currently installed.) Removing chrony (3.2-4ubuntu4.2) ... Job for systemd-timesyncd.service failed because the control process exited with error code. See "systemctl status systemd-timesyncd.service" and "journalctl -xe" for details. dpkg: error processing package chrony (--remove): installed chrony package post-removal script subprocess returned error exit status 1 Errors were encountered while processing: chrony E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1) I turned off the systemd-timesync ntp and that then allowed chrony to be removed (not quite what I wanted but that is another story): mark@bigben:/var/log/chrony$ sudo timedatectl status Local time: Sat 2020-04-11 10:55:31 UTC Universal time: Sat 2020-04-11 10:55:31 UTC RTC time: Sat 2020-04-11 10:55:31 Time zone: Etc/UTC (UTC, +0000) System clock synchronized: yes systemd-timesyncd.service active: yes RTC in local TZ: no mark@bigben:/var/log/chrony$ sudo timedatectl set-ntp false mark@bigben:/var/log/chrony$ sudo timedatectl status Local time: Sat 2020-04-11 10:55:50 UTC Universal time: Sat 2020-04-11 10:55:50 UTC RTC time: Sat 2020-04-11 10:55:50 Time zone: Etc/UTC (UTC, +0000) System clock synchronized: yes systemd-timesyncd.service active: no RTC in local TZ: no $ sudo apt --fix-broken install Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Correcting dependencies... Done The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required: libboost-filesystem1.65.1 libboost-iostreams1.65.1 libboost-system1.65.1 libcwidget3v5 libip4tc2 libnspr4 libnss3 python3.6 python3.6-minimal Use 'sudo apt autoremove' to remove them. The following additional packages will be installed: libboost-iostreams1.71.0 libcwidget4 libxapian30 Suggested packages: libcwidget-dev xapian-tools The following packages will be REMOVED: chrony The following NEW packages will be installed: libboost-iostreams1.71.0 libcwidget4 The following packages will be upgraded: libxapian30 1 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 1 to remove and 439 not upgraded. 2 not fully installed or removed. Need to get 0 B/1204 kB of archives. After this operation, 3022 kB of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue? [Y/n] (Reading database ... 171920 files and directories currently installed.) Removing chrony (3.2-4ubuntu4.2) ... And then installing chrony again worked. So it looks like we need to harden the chrony packaging for the world of systemd-timesync in general if we want upgrades to focal with chrony not to have problems.