Have you upgraded to 20.04?

[michael351]

Have you upgraded to 20.04?

Did you use 'do-release-upgrade' or
perform a clean install?

I have tried upgrading from 18.04 to 20.04 and have been unsuccessful.
Just curious how others have upgraded.

[CelticWarrior]

I almost always perform a clean install.

[deadflowr]

Thread moved to Ubuntu, Linux and OS Chat

[tea for one]

Clean install every two years with LTS version.

[CatKiller]

I've moved one of my computers up to 20.04. I'll upgrade my HTPC when I get round to it, and my desktop when I've emotionally committed to saying goodbye to Amarok.

I upgrade rather than fresh install unless it's at the same time as a hardware change, or if it's been a while since I did a fresh install. I've not had any problems.

[Impavidus]

Normally I upgrade, but this time, going from 19.10 to 20.04, I did a fresh install. The system had been incrementally upgraded from 16.10, so I thought is was about time for a fresh install. In a few weeks I'll upgrade to 20.10.

[ajgreeny]

Clean install here as well.

I have only upgraded from one version to the next once, and that was last week, from a KVM virtual install of 20.10 to 21.04, which went very well.
This update was carried out by manually editing the sources.list file from groovy to hirsute as at this time there is no other software means for a version upgrade as far as I'm aware.

[Frogs Hair]

Never done an LTS to LTS upgrade .

[pantazi]

No problem here upgrading from 16.04 through 18.04 to 20.04 on my aging HP 8460p

[TheFu]

I have many systems.

In June did a fresh install of 20.04, then restored my desktop data, settings, and list of apt packages into it from a 16.04 system. That was fine, but about 2 months later, after weekly patching, it failed to boot. I spent about 30 minutes troubleshooting. When that failed, I wiped it, did a fresh install and restored from backups taken about 8 hrs earlier. Never figured out the issue. The 20.04 install does require about 2x more storage than 16.04. I started out wth 22G on the 16.04 desktop. Decided 30G would provide a little headroom for 20.04, only to find that snaps were eating 10G+ and all that headroom was gone. Added 10G more (thanks LVM) and everything has been ok.

That system is working today, though a number of problems broke some of my workflows. Firefox and thunderbird have both been extremely unstable over remote X11, which has been working for decades - literally. When they are working, they are terribly slow. Don't bother right-clicking unless you have 2 minutes free for the popup menu. This is specific to 20.04.

Chromium is useless. They broke the code so firejail doesn't work with or without the snap. Snaps seldom work over remote X11. Sad.

Backup software was hit by python3 incompatibilities with my backup server. Ended up porting the python2 code to 20.04 and that is working. The root issue was with a change in serialization between p2 and p3. On disk, the data is stored the same as always, so there aren't data incompatibilities.

For my servers, I only run LTS releases and always attempt an lts-to-lts upgrade for existing, complex, systems. This is done into VMs as a trial. I always read the Release Notes before attempting and research differences BEFORE starting. Previously, about 85% have worked, including minor changes needed for mariadb, nginx, or apache versions. The few that failed , I'd attempt a few more times in test situations. Only once did I need to start over completely with a fresh install and data, settings, migration. 1 time, no upgrade or migration worked at all. I ended up switching the software used to something better supported. No need to stay with server programs that don't handle migrations well. We have plenty of choices for most things.

When the server migrations start will mainly be determined by zimbra support of 20.04. Sometimes, they take a year to support a new lts. We're on 16.04 still with zibra. Last upgrade was from 12.04 --> 14.04 --> 16.04 in 2 hrs. That worked well, with just a few bumps (perl version changes) after a few weeks testing the migration process.

Only my VPN server runs 18.04. No upgrade has been attempted. 18.04 network changes were lacking for my needs until about a year ago when it started working after a netplan patch. Because my vpn deployment is only for a few people and fewer than 20 devices, I was willing to try that first. I has turned out fine. I am sligtly concerned over less tan great network performance in 20.04. Don't know if that is kernel or driver related. Did some tests a fw days ago and saw tat 20.04 was throttled by 30% nside a VM compared to other releases. Instead of 30 Gbps, I was seeing only 20 Gbps. On real hardware, with GigE connections, it doesn't matter.

But my anecdotal stories aren't as good as a place running 1,000+ systems doing upgrades for desktops and servers.