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I was running 14.04 on my Intel Atom processor based netbook. However, when I upgraded to Ubuntu 16.04, the netbook stopped working properly.

I have now understood that the 1 GB of RAM is not adequate to run 16.04. I therefore want to roll back to 14.04.

Is there an easier way of roll back or, do I need to download 14.04 and install over the existing system?

Bex
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Pakkam s Dilipkumar
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    I think the best option is to download and reinstall. Maybe it works to keep the /home directory (and use it as a separate /home partition). See also the comments at this link, https://askubuntu.com/questions/937308/error-while-updating-ubuntu-17-04#comment1485456_937308 . An alternative is to try an Ubuntu family flavour with a lighter desktop environment (Lubuntu, Ubuntu MATE and Xubuntu). See this link and links from it for for details, http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2230389 – sudodus Jul 18 '17 at 13:47

2 Answers2

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I, therefore want to roll back to 14.04. Is there an easier way of roll back

A rollback only works if you set this up before you needed it, or as what we call: if you created backups of your personal data.

or, do I need to download 14.04 and install over the existing system?

That is a method with some potential problems: installing over an existing system can leave artifacts from the newer system and that can get messy. If a configuration file has newer options than the older operating system understands it could potentially crash on that. But that would mostly happen when you use servers (like MySQL).

I would advice to boot from the installer and first make a backup. Verify the backup and then re-install on a newly formatted partition. If you do that over the current one or 1st create a new empty partition and use that we leave up to you. The latter lets you copy files over from the other version until you remove it but it will cost you space for the new installation until you remove it.

Rinzwind
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Whether this will work is a firm "maybe". I've restored a backup of 14.04 over a partition upgraded from 14.04 to 16.04 (early in the 16.04 life, before upgrading was actually recommended), and had no significant problems. Note that this meant that whatever changes 16.04 (and in my case, KDE 5) had made didn't break 14.04 and KDE 4.

You can't, however, count on that being the case; the better plan would be, if possible, to back up all personal date from the /home folder to another storage device, then do a clean install of 14.04.

Zeiss Ikon
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