Why is my Ubuntu 18.04 distribution asking me to upgrade to Pop!_OS 19.10?

By adding the Pop PPA, you've received the patched version of GNOME Control Center, which pulls in pop-upgrade, which will prompt to upgrade to Pop!_OS 19.10. It's a required dependency of the patched version of gnome-control-center, so removing it would also remove the control center. We don't recommend adding the Pop! ppa on top of Ubuntu. We apologize for the issues it caused!

So I figured out what the issue is after some detective work and some experimentation. I had the Pop! ppa on my system for some reason. I guess this was a side effect of using the Pop Icon theme. I was searching through folders in /var/lib/ and found an empty pop-upgrade folder. At first I was not certain what it was, but it was entirely too coincidental for me to have a Pop!_OS system upgrade message and run across this folder and not have them be connected.

I have TimeShift on a daily schedule (highly recommend this people) so I decided to just sudo apt-get remove pop-upgrade and see what happened. I did this and then used autoremove but I ran into issues. I no longer had an ability to get to my default Gnome Settings menu. There were probably a bunch of other issues.

So what I did was I used TimeShift to go back to the day before, and when I went to apt-get upgrade I realized that gnome-control-center was being held back from upgrading because it needed additional packages. Those packages were libpop-upgrade and something else. So now I had it cornered. I must have used dist-upgrade earlier that night without realizing it, and it just force installed those extra Pop! packages, which led to the message. After I removed the Pop! ppa from my sources list, gnome-control-center no longer wanted to update, and pop-upgrade was not requesting an install.

Basically, do not have Pop! ppa on your Ubuntu system, because it will cause problems. I should have seen this coming but I am still only an intermediate with Linux. If you have already run into this same problem I had above, roll back to a previous point in time before the gnome-control-center upgrade, and remove the Pop! ppa from your system. Then you should be able to use update and upgrade without contaminating your system.