Have you upgraded to 20.04?

**DuckHook** · November 27th, 2020

Originally Posted by michael351

…Just curious how others have upgraded.

I have upgraded both ways on various machines with varying success for either method.

My main box is multi‑boot. On that box, my main and second partitions have been successfully network upgraded from Precise to Trusty to Bionic and now to Focal. That's 3 LTS upgrades with only minor problems along the way. Nothing that could not be figured out with a little cussedness and the help of fellow forum members.
The third partition is more experimental: it contains a standard release on LVM for easy snapshots. This one has had bigger problems, sometimes necessitating scratch upgrades. Most network upgrades go well, but not all. Because they are standard releases, the problems do not surprise me.
Mrs DuckHook's machine and any of half dozen assorted laptops, spare desktops, R-PIs, etc are usually network upgraded with only minor problems.
I run a half dozen different servers. They are typically network upgraded with few problems. This is also expected since they are much simpler, with no GUIs and stripped down to only the most minimal services. There's simply less that can go wrong.

I suppose I should explain what I mean by "minor problems". I don't consider the following to be a big deal. They just require a bit of tuning or a workaround:

Broken sound (fixed by nuking old pulseaudio config)
Dropped printers (fixed with newer hplip database)
Strange artefacts in DE (fixed by clearing out old caches)
Poor, stuttering video with dropouts (fixed by changing from Totem to VLC)

Bigger problems have been:

No video at all (regression in kernel)
No network (driver dropped from kernel)
End of 32-bit support (still 2 years of breathing space, but will ultimately be forced to use Debian)

Bigger problems can stump me. Sometimes, as in the case of 32-bit EoL, there's no other option but to drop Ubuntu altogether.

**davehk** · November 27th, 2020

Tried upgrading 8.04 to 12.04 - failed miserably so did a fresh instal. Since then, I just back-up my data and do a fresh install of the LTS. I generally only upgrade to every other LTS version.

**coffeecat** · November 27th, 2020

Originally Posted by pushbike06

Sorry about this dual post but was not aware that the latest post is placed at top and not appended.

Not with the default thread display mode, it doesn’t. Have you changed your thread display mode under general settings in your profile settings? Default is oldest first. Sounds like you may have changed it to newest first. There are two other display mode settings, which I’ve never found useful. Beware.

**michael351** · November 27th, 2020

What is the main benefit of upgrading to 20.04 over 18.04 in your case?

**DuckHook** · November 27th, 2020

Originally Posted by michael351

What is the main benefit of upgrading to 20.04 over 18.04 in your case?

Because I help out on these forums, I must keep reasonably current. That's an unusual motivation for most folks.

To be frank, were it not for this reason, there's not a lot of incentive to upgrade. Mrs DH had been happily running on Precise (16.04) until I upgraded her last month. Since Precise is EoL in April, I convinced her it was time, but barring that, she would have been perfectly happy staying with a four‑year old version.

I still have servers running Bionic. Many of the power users here are still running 18.04. There's no reason not to.

I suppose that, because the world is addicted to the latest and greatest, you will tend to find better support on the forums with the latest LTS release, but if 18.04 is running rock steady for you, then there's no need for support in the first place.

There's nothing wrong with running 18.04. And in the case of my 32-bit server, upgrading is not even an option.

**TheFu** · November 27th, 2020

Originally Posted by michael351

What is the main benefit of upgrading to 20.04 over 18.04 in your case?

Since you didn't specify a specific person and we can't read your mind, I'll answer too.

If I need to replace an OS, then I want to minimize the number of times I have do that. I want systems that run, for as long at possible, with the minimal number of hassles. Changing an OS is a hassle. With 5 yrs of support, it isn't hard to skip an entire LTS (releases are every 2 yrs), which reduces the hassle-factor 50% just with that single choice.

Plus, by avoiding being an early adopter for important systems, most of the major stuff that is broken will be fixed in a few months after an LTS release. Businesses are known to wait until the .1 of an LTS release happens. For 20.04, the .1 happened a few months ago.

My networking needs are often a little more complex than that for a typical home Ubuntu user. This means when some of the more complex network capabilities don't work with an LTS, as happened with 18.04 (which took over 18 months to get to the point I could us it), then any incentive to run that OS are lowered. When I needed a new email gateway server and 18.04 networking wasn't ready, I deployed a Debian server instead. OTOH, when I wanted to deploy a pi-hole into an LXD container last April, 20.04 wasn't ready for my needs, so it got 18.04. I think that's the only 18.04 system I have today.

Today, if I were deploying any new desktop or new server for someone else, I'd go with 20.04.1 - unless they hated Snap packages, then for desktops, I would push them towards Linux-Mint or Debian Stable. If they don't know anything about snap packages, then Ubuntu is fine. They may or may not have issues, but that is a bridge every individual will fall from in their own time.

**pantazi** · November 27th, 2020

I'm a typical average user but both my wife and I find 20.04 looks good and is a little smoother (for want of a better word) than 18.04. My wife's laptop was pre-loaded with 20.04 ( Starlabs Labtop) and after using it for a while, I upgraded mine to 20.04.1. It's pretty customisable and my ageing HP8460p brick is running pretty slick.

Just tried Mate and Xubuntu in Virtualbox, but for our needs Ubuntu does it all.