my big upgrade to kubuntu 24.04 lts

This was an adventure.

I've been using Linux for over a year now. An OS notification came through that said hey, you can update to the new LTS. I thought about maybe waiting to do it since it is a rather large update.

Then I said screw it. I'm committed to Linux now as my daily driver OS, so let's do this and see what breaks.

Yes, some stuff broke.

The update actually went fairly smoothly. The updater downloaded everything, but there were certain parts that were confusing. One of them was a question whether I wanted to remove certain outdated stuff. I did not know this would remove some apps (such as mpv, which I like). However, I was able to get back what I lost.

Virtualbox, which I use for some vintage Windows XP stuff, broke completely. I had to reinstall that from scratch. Not that big of a deal. It works now.

ZIP is semi-broken. An update has been released but it's not in the repositories yet.

Ark, the main GUI archiver in Kubuntu, is also semi-broken because it won't open up 7z archives. This is being worked on currently. I'm getting around this by using Xarchiver, which is in the repositories.

My Application Launcher went slightly wonky, but I fixed that by selecting a different one, then switching back, and now it looks okay.

In Dolphin file manager, Trash can no longer be emptied with a right-click+E as that is now "Edit". That's annoying, but not a deal-breaker. I installed trash-cli that allows me to do trash management from Terminal. I actually like it.

KDE decided not to auto-mount new devices anymore. I fixed this by going to System Settings > Removable Storage > Removable Devices, and checked "On Login" and "On Attach" for "All Devices". Now it works like before. I plug in a USB stick and it auto-mounts like it's supposed to.

That's more or less it. Everything else actually worked.

I did get a few software upgrades. LibreOffice now at 24.2.5.2, Kate editor now up to 23.08.5 which FINALLY introduced macro recording (has to be enabled by clicking one box in plugins, and it's a VERY welcome feature), Audacity got updated, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

The only real annoyance is Ark being semi-broken since I use 7z fairly regularly. Again, I get around this with Xarchiver. And yeah, I know the command line version of 7zip well, but still, I really hope Ark gets fixed up.

I took a gamble with this update...

...because I really wanted to see what would break. I could have waited a few months, but said no, let's do this. I want to see how bad things get.

The end result is that things weren't really bad at all.

This update was not all that much different from back when I used to use Windows 10 as my daily driver. That OS has been around almost 10 years if you can believe it (originally released July 2015). Over the years, Win10 had some really big updates. Whenever one of them happened, there was always the chance something would break or just outright not work anymore, and I did run into that.

With Kubuntu, the worst that happened with this big update were a few things ended up being semi-broken but not totally broken for what I use my computer for.

What I was most impressed with more than anything else is the update actually worked, and the holy-crap-my-computer-is-broken moment did not happen.

I'm still good with Linux and will keep on truckin' with it.

Published 2024 Sep 3