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So, thing is, I'm running 17.10 and since I'll be very busy in the following year and won't have time for upgrades and installs, I thought about installing 18.04 right away. I'm asking this now, because today is the feature freeze day, so since only bugfixes are getting in now, it should count as somewhat stable at least?

What's your advice/opinion?

Zanna
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uxbal
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    We can't answer this. 18.04 is not finished, bugs are to be expected but how well it works also depends on drivers and your hardware. And how well you can fix something yourself. – Rinzwind Mar 01 '18 at 11:29
  • Thanks mr Rinzwind. And in a given situation if you were to choose between Ubutnu 18.04 and openSUSE Tumbleweed (rolling), which would you pick? thanks. – uxbal Mar 01 '18 at 11:32
  • What kind of choice is that? 18.04 of course, OS T does not even support virtualbox :-P – Rinzwind Mar 01 '18 at 11:39

4 Answers4

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Make a test plan

There is an old saying "We don't plan to fail, we fail to plan". On that premise make yourself a test plan:

  • Create a 18.04 Live USB with persistent storage.
  • Boot from the USB and select "Try before Installing".
  • Install your mission critical applications to the USB's persistent storage.
  • Test your applications with a COPY of your data.
  • Do not test the programs on the real live data on sdX.
  • Try out your USB keyboards and mice.
  • Try out your printer(s).
  • Access your favorite websites and download files.
  • Test suspend and resume.
  • Test Fn keys for volume and brightness.
  • Make a keyboard shortcut and ensure it works ok.
  • Test systemd, cron and other system utilities.
  • If you've written scripts, copy them over and test them.
  • Test xrandr functions you have used before.
  • Run CPU & RAM stress tests. System benchmarks might be helpful too.
  • Remember 18.04 uses Unity 7.5 but 16.04 uses Unity 7.4 I think.
  • Of course you should test Anything else you can think of

This test plan might be overly cautious in some areas so you might scale it back depending on your comfort level and time constraints.

Clone your data on disk instead of USB

If you have enough disk space to hold a copy of your Ubuntu partition, or an external drive or USB Pen Drive that can hold it, use this script: Bash script to clone Ubuntu to new partition for testing 18.04 LTS upgrade Then you can clone your data without rebooting.

The advantage is you avoid the time consuming and laborious task of rebooting to a Live Boot USB. The speed of conversion is also many times faster on an internal drive.

Summary

For myself I made an Ubuntu 18.04 Live-USB with Persistent Storage a couple months ago and was surprised how stable it was.

Since then there has be a raft of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS automatic updates with bugs so I've stopped updating Ubuntu since January 1, 2018. I enjoy the stability of 16.04 before year 2018 so I'll just keep using it as is. After 30 days of no bug reports of LTS updates I'll update 16.04. I will hold off converting 16.04 LTS to 18.04 LTS when it initially comes out in April 2018. Again I'll pay close attention to bug reports and pull the trigger on upgrading when instinct tells me the time is right.

WinEunuuchs2Unix
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  • Working in IT you can usually afford 2nd machine where you can have your environment replicated. Update one, see if it works, then if you're happy (take your time, give it few days/weeks), update the 2nd one. This works for me the best. – Tom Raganowicz Jul 18 '18 at 12:30
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I use Kubuntu 18.04 which I installed about a week ago on both my desktop and laptop machines. Opengl was completely broken on the standard repositories with my AMD gpu (both with Kubuntu and Ubuntu MATE) so I use the proposed repository. Of course that means additional danger for breaking things since you need to make sure that everything on the proposed repository has finished landing (also better to use the main ubuntu mirror which gets synced frequently instead of the local one.

EDIT: OpenGL works fine now at daily builds

I would recommend you this:

  1. Wait until mesa 18.0 lands from the proposed repository to the standard repositories (https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mesa) EDIT: Mesa 18.0 has now been landed in the standard bionic beaver repositories.
  2. If you want to use the official Ubuntu flavor, then wait until Gnome 3.28 is released and until most of its software has landed the ubuntu reposiotires in order to avoid more problems.
  3. In any way, it's better that you wait at least until the final beta on April 5th (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BionicBeaver/ReleaseSchedule)
Thanos Apostolou
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  • Hi, after seeing mesa 18 as you suggested hittin Ubuntu, I installed. For now, everything purrs like a kitty cat :) – uxbal Mar 06 '18 at 06:20
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I've been running a 32 bit Lubuntu system and a 64 bit Ubuntu system on 18.04 for a month or so now on some old laptops just for fun.

I have not utilized them heavily but nothing has broken the systems badly. I have been pleasantly surprised.

Organic Marble
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Installed Ubuntu 18.04 LTS with MATE DE - it works great on open-source Intel GPU drivers.

As usual modern GNOME is glossy but lost last parts of usability.

N0rbert
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