Another bug in Ubuntu with a stopgap fix. Not a single year without them.

Latest: apt-get update randomly hangs for hours on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. Known since 22.04, still not fixed.

apt failed to lock /var/lib/apt/lists — held by a stuck apt-get process

The worst part? It silently blocks unattended-upgrades. Your servers stop receiving security updates and you don’t even know (if you have no alerts 🥲).

The “fix”? A cron job that kills stuck apt processes 🙄.

That’s why Google, Amazon, and others roll their own Linux distributions.