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Ask HN: Should I upgrade Ubuntu to 22.04 LTS?

47 points by orzig ↗ HN
I'm currently on 18.04 LTS. It "ain't broken", which is the most compelling case for "don't fix"

On the other hand, 4 years is a long time! What new features have you found valuable?

Also feel free to ask context questions, since at some level the answer is obviously "It depends". Here are some high level things:

- This is my daily personal computer. Google mail/calendar/etc

- Programming Python through VSCode for AWS

- No intensive gaming

- Intel® Core™ i7-7700HQ CPU @ 2.80GHz × 8, and NVIDIA GEForce GTX GPU, on the theory that I will someday do neural network projects

84 comments

[ 18.0 ms ] story [ 394 ms ] thread
pmontra
I upgrade every two years, usually in summer after bugs get fixed or at least assessed. I don't stay on older releases because it gets progressively harder to install new versions of software. Example from a few days ago, OSM for emacs requires an emacs version newer than the one in 20.04. There are ways to install it but it takes time.

And 18.04 will be EOL next year, right?

flatiron
my headless home server is the same, every other summer a few weeks after the .1 release, i suck it up and update. usually after a few hours i have all my crap up and running again.

im hoping for a smooth update this summer as ive migrated a whole bunch of stuff over to docker.

wink
Same here. If it comes out in April I usually wait 2-3 months and then upgrade, unless there are severe reasons not to (e.g. it's a work machine and we're running some weird stuff where I'd be the one doing all the work to make it run on the next one), or if I have actual problems with the old one, only then I'll go first in April. Does not apply for my random "browse some stuff at home" laptop, there would be no reservations going ahead on release day.
Kwpolska
Just do it, OS upgrades are pretty stable these days, and you’re unlikely to be missing any features. Though probably I’d upgrade to 20.04 now (or two-ish years ago), and then wait a while until 22.04 gets more stable. (And of course, make backups first, and do it on a Saturday/a day on which a broken computer will not cause too much hassle.)
pizza234
This strategy doesn't take into account external programs, which may not be compiled/packaged for newly released Ubuntu versions.

If one uses many programs from external sources, and doesn't intend to compile them, it may take some time (ie. at least a few months) to have all of them running on the new O/S.

sp332
This seems backward to me. It's more likely that a new OS version will still have backward-compatible packages, and an old OS version will not support newer versions of apps.
moffkalast
Well it's both really, the most sensible version to use right now is 20.04. Not too far back for people to be dropping support, not too bleeding edge to have missing packages.

16.04 is really getting the axe right now.

pizza234
It's both backward and forward :)

A lot of programs are dynamically linked; an older O/S may not support some newer librariers, and a newer O/S may not support older ones.

While static linking solves this, a hypothetical distribution that is fully statically linked, would take a huge amount space (and memory) - definitely one order of magnitude more (potentially more - a statically linked hello world in go is something like two orders of magnitude larged than the dynamically linked one, although this is an edge case).

password4321
After Ubuntu 18 I will be switching to Debian. You should try a VM to see if you can stomach snaps.
philliphaydon
I tried Debian. If you want to run latest hardware its horrible experience. I shoved it on an old laptop and it was flawless. Put it on a new ryzen and I got constant crashing. Ended up on manjaro on my new hardware and it’s been great.
mst
I still haven't forgiven the manjaro developers for their habit of - instead of actually trying to help - sending users to the arch linux community support channels with instructions to lie about which distro they were using to get help under false pretenses.

I don't think they still do that but the lack of any sort of public apology that I've seen makes me suspect that they only stopped because they got caught.

blihp
As a counterpoint I'm running on Ryzen 5000 with a RDNA 2 GPU on Debian which is working pretty well. (zero CPU/chipset issues and one GPU issue which I can work around) The main 'trick' to running hardware (mainly CPU/GPU) that was released within 3-6 months of the last Debian stable freeze is to run Debian testing for driver support.
philliphaydon
(This was back when ryzen 3000 dropped, it worked flawlessly on manjaro but failed on Debian. I’m sorry I should have mentioned.)
zozbot234
You can install a backported kernel release from the stable-backports repository for up-to-date hardware support.
kajiryoji
Wayland of course! I guess the necessity depends on whether you want non-integer scaling factors.
Pooge
I'm not a Ubuntu user anymore, but I still want to give my opinion: I hate staying behind on updates. I'd rather have it break a few days after release than postpone the trouble and wait until EOL. But that's just me. From my experience, the Ubuntu update process goes smoothly.

Take a glance at the changes[1] and see what you want to do. Either way, I'd recommend not postponing until EOL. I'd just recommend to wait a few weeks in order for the developers to iron out some of the bugs that usually come out on the first few days, and you're good to go.

[1]: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2022/01/ubuntu-22-04-release-fea...

dingdingdang
Similar boat (sort of I guess), moved off Ubuntu onto Mint since I can not abide with Canonical's decision to package in Snap format. It's not user friendly, it's slow and now I'm on another distro that's fully compatible with Ubuntu but don't suffer from their corporate strategy re. Snap :). Would equally recommend to stay on top of release-cycle (either LTS or regular) no matter what distro you are on!
mistrial9
my 1804 machines are doing great work everyday, while 2004 is quickly turned off as soon as possible.. why?

* snapd taking over.. what is all this junk ?!

* too many processes.. too many IMPORTANT msgs to upgrade anything.. high idle on heavy equipment where 1804 purrs along

* wayland graphics.. previous VMs in vbox worked great, now its back to the 1980s with cursor lag and constant slow response

honestly, this 2004 compared to 1804 is the first time in ten years I have delayed and rolled back an Ubuntu LTS install; daily driver here. 2204? prove yourself

longitudinal93
No need to run Wayland. Choose xorg on the login screen. Same in 22.04.
Ocha
First thing I do when I install 20.04 is to remove snap completely. I run it for servers and never had problem (or need to use snaps)
petecooper
>First thing I do when I install 20.04 is to remove snap completely.

Out of interest, how do you do this, please? I realise I can search for it, but I prefer field reports. Thank you.

petecooper
Rescuing my dented pride after downvotes. Lesson learned. Here:

apt purge snapd \ && systemctl daemon-reload \ && apt autoremove -y \ && apt clean -y \ && apt autoclean -y

It's a sledgehammer for a nut approach, but it seems to work.

mixmastamyk
Also need to remove the folders ~/snap and possibly /snap. ;-)
philliphaydon
I made the mistake of installing ubuntu server 20.04. Why the F would I want snap on a server???
dorianmariefr
let's encrypt uses snap for instance
keikobadthebad
Certbot is available as a snap in addition to the other ways, that's all.

"Let's Encrypt" server side doesn't use snaps AFAIK.

tinus_hn
As far as I am aware the ‘snap’ installation is the only supported solution. Do you have another?
philliphaydon
You don’t need snap to use let’s encrypt on ubuntu.
jaimex2
Do it.This isn't Windows or OSX where half your stuff will break or device brick.

In 10 years I've never had a dist upgrade issue.

kgwxd
I love Linux but I've had way more stuff break on me with upgrades then I have with any Windows or Mac updates and the stuff that does break is usually the real painful stuff like video card drivers where I can't even boot to a terminal because I can't see anything. I usually end up doing a clean install.
warrenm
I've never had anything break on a Mac with an OS update - and I've been running them for 30+ years
mmaug
We run MacOS in my corporate environment and updates are universally dreaded. Our CTO (an excellent programmer/technologist) refuses to update his laptop (and rejected a machine upgrade) because of the breakage of applications with each OS update. Granted we don't have the device driver failures that are encountered in Linux because Apple defines the machine specs, but changes to their privacy/security settings breaks all of our apps every single time.
warrenm
Sorry you've had that experience

I've never seen what you're describing in many decades

Sounds like your applications are to blame, though - maybe relying on un[der]documented and/or outdated features?

brimble
An Ubuntu dist upgrade on a machine of mine once forgot how to read an encrypted root disk. That its own installer had set up originally, and the config of which I'd never touched (the machine as a whole had approximately no customization, in fact—it was just a box I had hooked up to a TV, nothing special going on). This was just a one-version jump, mind you.

[EDIT] Oh and there was that release in the late '00s, I think, when they pushed out PulseAudio way too early (shoulda never done it at all...) and it caused your whole X session to crash if your browser loaded any Flash content at all. Which was still in wide use at the time. How the shit that got through QC, I'll never know. There's no chance, in that year, that someone testing or developing it hadn't tried to load HomeStarRunner or something, or had a Flash ad try to load. Hell I think YouTube might have still used Flash on Linux at the time.

blihp
I wouldn't go that far: I've had issues with every major version upgrade so far and I've been using Linux for over 25 years. My experience with Ubuntu has been a bit bumpier with Ubuntu than other distros on desktops in particular.

There's always at least one driver (or default) that has changed just enough to break something requiring research to fix and usually a couple of packages that have been removed from the repos. So I always figure on an afternoon to deal with any immediate (i.e. booting) issues and a bumpy few days as I have to work out any substitutions.

oarsinsync
I'm pretty confidendent in saying that I've had Windows, OSX, Debian, Red Hat, Fedora and Ubuntu release upgrades all result in some kind of breakage that has taken time to fix.

I think the only platforms I've not had comparable levels of breakage with are FreeBSD and Solaris, but then I only ever did one upgrade in both cases, so maybe I just got lucky.

It's great if you've never had problems, I feel envy for you, but some small % of users will have problems due to the sheer number of different hardware and software configurations out there.

Hell, I haven't even managed a single upgrade of OpenWRT without losing a bunch of additional configuration / packages.

peterbraden
A ubuntu upgrade bricked a virtual server that I had relied on. Network access was so broken that I ended up exporting the data, and killing the machine.

Just an anecdote to counter your assertion.

pizza234
Ubuntu 20.04 is the first version where BT worked decently for my machines. I don't know if bluez fixes have been backported to 18.04 (but I don't think so), so if you use BT, the upgrade (to 20.04+) may make your devices work better.

For people with modern AMD machines (which is not your case), 20.04 should be a significant difference, since kernel versions around 5.10 added support for recent AMD CPUs.

The two above are the only things I remember making a difference on my system.

Software wise, it depends on the user practices. There are a variety of ways to obtain up to date packaged software (docker images, application images, PPAs etc - often from the official maintainers), so one can stay on a relatively old Ubuntu version, and still have up to date software without manually compiling anything. The exception is the kernel.

longitudinal93
Video out through USB-C also now working flawlessly.
newusertoday
i upgraded tp 20.0.4LTS from 18.04LTS last weekend because its four years and i know what to expect in it(snapization) and i am ok with it. I have heard about wayland everywhere in 22LTS which looks like a big change so i will wait for another 2 years to get all the reviews and upgrade when 24LTS is ready.
kevindong
I'd upgrade personally since the further behind you get, the more painful it becomes to upgrade down the road.
FpUser
I cant live with the snap. So it is Debian and Mint now.
bArray
Yeah, Snap is the reason I will be moving away from Ubuntu. Mint in my opinion can suffer some of the same issues and they will too have to address the Snap issue sooner or later (as they use Ubuntu packages). Something Debian or Arch based sounds nicer by the day.

The Snap sandboxing sounds great until you realise it means you can't access hardware reliably and sometimes you can't access files. Snap likes to randomly update and restart stuff you are actively working on. Ubuntu are too heavily invested into Snap now to walk it back.

Additionally, I hate Gnome more and more by the day. It's a slow buggy mess and is not worth the bells and whistles for this amount of unreliability. Gnome randomly crashes after over a month of up time.

When you see the Gnome blog updates, you only see updates regarding the Cloud, IoT and business interests. The Ubuntu Desktop seems to have taken a back seat these days.

FpUser
>"Mint in my opinion can suffer some of the same issues and they will too have to address the Snap issue sooner or later"

My first main concern were servers and I went with Debian. On desktop I use Mint for quite a while already since I can still get everything I need without snap. When / if it changes I'll deal with it. Desktop is easy to redo.

mixmastamyk
Gnome fixed their performance problem a release or two back. It has other problems.
brimble
Snap seems so obviously the wrong approach that I struggle to understand how it got this far.

Really, of the three big new-fangled Linux software distribution formats, AppImage is the only I've tried that didn't immediately turn me off.

barelysapient
I see you're using a Nvidia GPU. Are you also running the NVIDIA driver? If so I'd be cautious. I've had multiple installs break when installing or updating the Nvidia driver. Otherwise, if you're using the open source driver then I'd say go for it.
sp332
Do you need the proprietary graphics driver to do machine learning stuff?
barelysapient
I haven't used my GPU for ML. But if its similar to gaming then the open source driver is substantially slower than the Nvidia driver. I ended up changing to an AMD card which has been rock solid and doesn't require custom drivers.
goosedragons
If you want CUDA yes. So pretty much as the alternatives that work with Nouveau are much less supported and used.
moffkalast
Yeah you need the CUDA toolkit which comes with it I think
pizza234
Sadly, one may need proprietary Nvidia drivers to do... anything.

I had three nvidia cards, and at least two of them needed an installation ISO patched with the binary drivers, otherwise, they didn't start at all, or they would crash after a very short time.

rtpg
I highly recommend just taking the updates and installing them. LTS releases for desktop usage are just ways to sign yourself up to not have bugfixes for Gnome for 2+ years.

At least in my experience, each Ubuntu release has less crashes and just has improved usability over the past N years (N being large, but less than "Gnome 2 -> Gnome 3/Unity").

monocasa
I generally wait for the xx.04.01 LTS release.
moffkalast
> on the theory that I will someday do neural network projects

Haha, so I'm not the only one making that excuse for myself for years.

hathym
Does anyone know of an easy way to create a snapshot of the hard drive on linux? if anything go wrong you can back back and restore it back.
mattbillenstein
dd if=/dev/sda of=/mnt/other/foo.img bs=1M

and perhaps filter through gzip or something...

mst
If you're using lvm or zfs it's trivial.

If not, you're probably going to have to take a backup the old fashioned way.

moviuro 

  # dd if=/dev/sdX bs=4k status=progress conv=noerror | zstdmt - > /mnt/backup.zstd
ridgered4
Not exactly an answer to your question but Linux Mint's Timeshift has saved me a couple times.
warrenm
I've one (and only one) persistent upgrade issue in using Ubuntu over the last ~15 years - and that's ensuring that the updated/replaced Apache modules are enabled as they should be (especially PHP - it seems to be the biggest offender here)

Otherwise ... do this (as `root`):

--------------

# screen

(inside screen)

# do-release-upgrade

--------------

Participate where it wants, but otherwise sit back and enjoy the ride

savant_penguin
If you want to run neural nets you'll need to use the proprietary nvidia drivers and their matching cuda versions. I'd check which versions of the best ppas (graphics-drivers) are available for the newer distro.
mattbillenstein
Yes, after the systemd change, not a lot has changed really - since about 16.04 I think.

I roll every LTS upgrade maybe 3 months after the release - has always went pretty smoothly.

Ologn
I have used Ubuntu on desktop and laptop for years.

My main advice is consider when to upgrade. I never upgrade to the latest release on release day. Usually I try to wait two months. Safer would be three months. By then most of the major bugs found on release should be fixed. I was burned more than once by not doing this.

On the other hand, when I had more free time, I tested pre-release Ubuntu releases in the KVM, or even installed them as boot alternatives in GRUB, reporting any errors I could find.

If you're concerned about breakage, wait at least two months after release before upgrading. Maybe even three.

monsieurgaufre
As others have said, i'd personnally wait to the 22.04.01 update to migrate. Will do on some of my devices. My usecase is somewhat similar to yours.

Bugs that got throught are generally fixed. Keeping up with the LTS release conservatively is the best (and/or boring) way to avoid issues. There's nothing particularly groundbreaking about 22.04 and it's perfect that way.

I'm the user that like Gnome and I've mostly seen fewer annoyances and better memory management (Gnome is still not the lightest).

I don't have any NVIDIA parts, so I can't speak about that.

jjice
Personal thoughts: although not a ton of stuff I care about in this update, I've been through many Ubuntu update cycles and everything has worked fine for me. If anything, there are usually some improvements I've been waiting for.

I'd give it a go, just because it shouldn't cause any trouble and having some up to date software might not hurt.

speedgoose
Maybe wait one month or two after the release before upgrading.