How to run Electrum 4.7.x on Ubuntu 20.04

If you have tried to update Electrum wallet on your Ubuntu 20.04 machine, most likely you ran into an error.

E: Unable to locate package python3-pyqt6

The reason is that there is only PyQt5 (PythonQt) in the repository of Ubuntu 20.04 but new versions of Electrum like 4.7.2 require PyQt6. And at this point you should not try to update Electrum via apt and instead use the official Electrum AppImage. Here I explain how to do it.

Backup

First things first. Download your wallet backup. It only takes a couple of seconds but can save you a lot of trouble. Also make sure you have your seed phrase.

Updating

Download AppImage from electrum official website [4.7.2]

Make sure you downloaded the image from official website and not some third-party website.

cd ~/Downloads
wget https://download.electrum.org/4.7.2/electrum-4.7.2-x86_64.AppImage
chmod +x electrum-4.7.2-x86_64.AppImage
./electrum-4.7.2-x86_64.AppImage

Since AppImage is a portable executable file, we can create a launcher, so that it opens as normal application.

Create folder for the AppImage: mkdir -p ~/Applications
Move Electrum file over there: mv ~/electrum-4.7.2-x86_64.AppImage ~/Applications/Electrum.AppImage
Edit desktop launcher: nano ~/.local/share/applications/electrum.desktop
You will see the contents like below

In the Exec you will see something like: Exec=electrum %u You need to change it to the path of your AppImage, like: Exec=/home/YourUser/Applications/Electrum.AppImage
chmod +x ~/.local/share/applications/electrum.desktop

That’s it. After this, the new Electrum version will launch when you click on your desktop icon.