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Comment by jdboyd | Hacker News Reader

So far, an update from 22.04 LTS to 24.04 LTS on an Intel based Dell Lattitude laptop without any weird hardware produced a failure that was a white screen that just said to contact a system administrator. Could be a fluke. Trying to rescue this produced a non-bootable system. Could be user error.

After that a clean install of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS on the same machine worked, but after installing the latest Chrome on top of this, it won't start. After installing the latest Slack, that won't start either. BitWarden from the snap store will start, but after logging in, I get a endless spinner instead my vault contents. It is hard to believe that the Chrome/Slack/BitWarden issues are user error.

I'm not sure I've ever seen such a rough LTS release. I still wonder if this is just somehow me since surely they wouldn't release it without Chrome and Slack working, but I can't see what I could have done wrong just following the directions here.

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Ubuntu Desktop upgrade breakage is listed as a known issue: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/noble-numbat-release-notes/39...

Which indeed makes it a quite rushed release.

Ah, that's one annoying thing I had forgotten about ubuntu, thank you for reminding me!

So i've been using ubuntu for many years (my first release was 6.06). Updating to a new release never worked. Around 12.04 times (when I started to seriously feel the need for stability) i started to only to LTS-to-LTS update, which basically meant a full reinstall, but once every two years was a more manageable.

Nowadays I run fedora, so far the upgrade experience has been incredibly great. I already did three versions jumps (36 to 37, 37 to 38, 38 to 39) and it didn't break.

22.04 LTS users are advised to wait until August for 24.04.1: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/noble-numbat-release-notes/39...

I understand that 24.04 isn't really LTS until the 24.04.1 update comes out, but I like to start trying it on a secondary computer earlier, and I'm hoping not to wait that long since I really want the podman updates.

Subscribe on https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/glib2.0/+bug/20632... once that's fixed upgrade should work properly

Well, for one thing, Ubuntu 24.04 got to be the first big Debian-based release after 64-bit time_t migration, and they got rid of backwards-compatible package names early. I suppose removing hundreds of libraries, including heavily dependent on, to install them from new packages (with `t64`) in proper order can cause a lot of problems on non-trivial configurations.

Existing binary code should work (unless it interfaces with 32-bit code in some affected way), but external packages need to include new dependencies.

I also had a slightly rough experience. I started my upgrade from 22.04 -> 24.04 and walked away. I came back to my system frozen on the Plymouth screen. After trying and failing to get into a TTY a few times, I booted into recovery mode, re-ran the upgrade, and it actually worked.

That was a lot rougher than my experience upgrading from 20.04 -> 22.04, which went off without a hitch.

Believe the kernel is 6.8.0, which is surprising. Fedora is a faster moving distro and the bugfix digits incremented quickly every few days to 6.8.7 today. I wouldn't run a .0 kernel and didn't allow 6.8 to install/run on my machine until it hit .5.

I'm sure they have added a few patches, but seems like they could have shipped fewer basing off .5+ ?

Ubuntu uses a different kernel versioning scheme. The current version is 6.8.0-31.31

For the entire lifecycle (bar HWE kernel), it will remain at 6.8.0 and the number after - will be incremented with upstream and their own patches.

Sounds like they don't have enough patches in.

Chrome 124 processing ozone flags is broken.

If you set up ozone platform using chrome://flags, it will affect you. You can start with manually specifying --ozone-platform and then in chrome://flags, set ozone platform back to default.

https://issues.chromium.org/issues/329678163

For Chrome, some apparmor policy relaxation would likely be needed: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/noble-numbat-release-notes/39...

Having no snaps able to use DNS after upgrading thanks to AppArmor sure was a fun surprise

I wonder if that explains the BitWarden problem that I saw then.

I haven't been able to complete a fresh install on an empty drive yet. Either the installer crashes (most common), the installer throws an error, or the live USB freezes during booting.

That sounds a lot like a corrupted ISO/install media! I suggest verifying the checksums and trying a different USB drive.

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