Updating firmware on Dell XPS 13 With Pop!_OS 18.04

Firmware upgrades were failing for me on my Dell XPS 13. Running sudo fwupdmgr update would give me the following error:

UEFI firmware update failed: {error #0} libfwup.c:1501 get_fd_and_media_path(): failed to make /boot/efi/EFI/ubuntu/fw: No such file or directory

A little online research led to me to a page on Debugging UEFI Capsule updates, which in turn suggested that I try the latest fwupdate from master. My inability to RTFM¹ (coupled with being spoiled by package managers because it’s 2018), led me to open an issue on the fwpdate issue tracker when compilation failed.

Thankfully, I also wrote a comment explaining the core problem I was trying to solve and the author, Mario Limonciello, responded immediately with a solution: don’t use fwupdate, install fwupd via snap instead. (Thank you, Mario!)

That worked a charm and I am now running on the latest firmware.

I’m reproducing his instructions, below:

sudo apt purge fwupd
sudo snap install --candidate --classic fwupd
fwupdmgr refresh
fwupdmgr update