Re: [PLUG] Ubuntu LTS upgrade timing
On Wed, 13 Apr 2022 20:22:16 -0700 Keith Lofstrom dijo: >Questions for you folks with years of Ubuntu experience: > >1) How easy/fraught is a dist-upgrade, say 16.04 to 20.04? > >2) Should I wait for 22.04.1 (estimated 3+ months from >now) before playing with 22.04 Jammy? I left this thread alone for a while because I didn't want to get into the dist-upgrade vs. fresh install argument that it invites. I'll just say that the last time I did a fresh install it took eight days to get the system to about 80% usability for all my needs. At the same time I keep my systems up to date with the dist-update feature. (Dist-update /= dist-upgrade.) Once in a while there is a problem, but it's usually trivial. The dist-update feature is kind of a compromise between a rolling release distro and no changes until there is a new full release. Ubuntu does it by coming out with a stack of new stuff every month or so, including sometimes even new kernels. When I need to do a dist-upgrade (e.g., the impending need to upgrade my Xubuntu 20.04.something computers to 22.04), things get a bit more hairy. Before continuing I should state that Ubuntu will release 22.04 imminently as I write this (mid April, 2022), but only for fresh installs. Ubuntu's policy is not to make the dist-upgrade available until the first dot release. Usually that is a month or two later, but for 18.04 to 20.04 it was not available until nearly October. I should add that Ubuntu allows you to tell their Software Update app not to bother you with dist-upgrades until the next LTS version is available, or you can set it to announce it for every six-month upgrade. My preference is for LTS only, but some people prefer to do the dist-upgrade for each version, every six months for Ubuntu and Fedora. I should also mention that everyone's needs are different. Many still run releases that were released five and even ten years ago. I hate having to upgrade the system, but I find myself having to decide whether it is better to be gored from the front or from the back. If I don't upgrade, apps slowly lose features or fail to run at all, and worse, I can't install the latest version of an app. If I do upgrade then other apps suddenly won't work, but I gain things that I couldn't do before. Life is always six of one and half a dozen of another. My experience over more than a decade of Ubuntu dist-upgrades is that after a dist-upgrade there is always a day or two of patching stuff that breaks. Usually this actually results in a better outcome anyway; I just bitch at the time I have to spend putting my computer back together. I should add that, although occasionally I have had serious issues, I have never had a computer fail to boot after a dist-upgrade. I guess, to summarize, the closer your computer is to what you get with a fresh install, the fewer problems you will have with a dist-upgrade. The more you are like me - hundreds of strange apps and configurations - the more likely it is that you will feel pain. But then, you still save yourself the hassle of spending a week getting everything working like you need it to on a fresh install.
Re: [PLUG] Ubuntu LTS upgrade timing
Huh, you’re right. I swear I looked that up before, I musta saw the x20 release date or something. So much for the “my laptop is 20 years old and I need to upgrade” excuse I used. 11 years old is still pretty old…. And thanks to whoever sold me that thing from this list, it has served me well, and I will recommend an x series any time! On Thu, Apr 14, 2022 at 11:43 AM Tomas Kuchta wrote: > On Thu, Apr 14, 2022, 13:47 Nat Taylor wrote: > > > Of some relevance may be Rolling Rhino coming up, and another > > alternative that has kept my 20 year old Lenovo x220 chugging along, is > > plain old vanilla Arch Linux, with its rolling release. > > . > > > I understand what you are saying, BUT, as former Thinkpad x220 owner - I > must object! > > X220 was released in 2011, today is year 2022 ==> not quite 20 years yet. > > Since you are visiting from 2031, would you be willing to share some > details about stock prices, lottery numbers, etc? In private please! > > LOL, > -T > > > >
Re: [PLUG] Ubuntu LTS upgrade timing ... thanks!
Thank you for the replies. My main takeaway is do the
major LTS upgrades "rapidly-sequentially": for example,
make a one week "pit stop" at 24.04 while upgrading
from 22.04 to 26.04 .
Practically speaking, re-learning Linux system details
takes a few weeks for me, even with copious notes from
"last time". My profession is hardware engineering,
the details are physics and chemistry (and lately,
orbital mechanics). Relearning Linux OS details for
maintenance is distracting. A lot of those details
are encoded in home-made simulation code connected to
math libraries - I must transition that work too.
The VM idea sounds be a good way to encapsulate some of
that custom work - along with notes about how I did it
and the software I used to do it and where I found the
software. The downside of VM is that container systems
themselves go in and out of fashion; before I do that,
I hope to learn which virtualization is most likely to
endure ... for decades.
Being 68 years old, "decades" seems optimistic ... but
I just signed a birthday card for my 105 year old
father-in-law, who led building repair teams as recently
as ten years ago. Some of my own distributed team is
in their 20's, so I probably won't be able to answer
questions ("what the HELL was Keith thinking???")
50 years from now.
Simulation plus VM - hopefully the VM overhead added to
a kludgy numerical simulation spread out across multiple
processor cores won't slow it down by more than a factor
of two. I ponder migrating some of those nested C loops
graphics coprocessors, but that seems incompatible with
abstract virtualization.
One of the advantages of Ubuntu/Debian over CentOS/RH
is that there are fewer copyright/ownership hassles
for the proliferation of third party repositories for
source archives. And there are enough renegade geeks
maintaining oddball variants that I can probably find
archives compatible with the in-the-future-unfashionable
variants that I've chosen.
So -- thanks again!
Keith
P.S. "Clock of the long now" ... how do you format a
maintenance manual so that it is readable 10,000 years
from now?
--
Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
Re: [PLUG] Ubuntu LTS upgrade timing
On Thu, Apr 14, 2022, 13:47 Nat Taylor wrote: > Of some relevance may be Rolling Rhino coming up, and another > alternative that has kept my 20 year old Lenovo x220 chugging along, is > plain old vanilla Arch Linux, with its rolling release. > . I understand what you are saying, BUT, as former Thinkpad x220 owner - I must object! X220 was released in 2011, today is year 2022 ==> not quite 20 years yet. Since you are visiting from 2031, would you be willing to share some details about stock prices, lottery numbers, etc? In private please! LOL, -T >
Re: [PLUG] Ubuntu LTS upgrade timing
On Thu, Apr 14, 2022 at 10:12 AM Ben Koenig wrote: > Original Message > On Apr 14, 2022, 7:34 AM, Robert Citek < robert.ci...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Thu, Apr 14, 2022 at 12:52 AM TomasK > wrote: > > On Wed, 2022-04-13 at 20:22 -0700, Keith Lofstrom wrote: > > > Questions for you folks with years of Ubuntu experience: > > > > > > 1) How easy/fraught is a dist-upgrade, say 16.04 to 20.04? > > > > > It is easy to go from one LTS to the next: 16.04 --> 18.04 --> 20.04 > I used to do that and never had an issue. But I do not have an extremely > customized set up. > I first install in a VM to update and verify my install flow, then on a > > test machine - then I deploy it everywhere. There is plenty of support > > overlap to do that at my own pace. > A variation on that theme is to have a thin OS running a hypervisor on the > bare hardware and run everything else in a VM. VMs make upgrades really > painless, especially if using tools like Vagrant and a configuration > manager like Ansible. But even if you’re not using those tools, VMs are > nice for snapshotting, upgrading, testing, cloning, migrating, and > reverting, if necessary. Of course, you could always use your favorite > backup/restore utility, if not using a VM. > Regards, > - Robert > > https://xkcd.com/1827/ > > Be careful about survivorship bias. You have to look at dist-upgrade > failures as a percent of total attempts. > > During my internships at Free Geek, I helped implement custom packages > that disabled all dist-upgrade prompts. For a user base exceeding 10,000 > end-users, fixing failed dist upgrades was a problem we dealt with > frequently. A lot can go wrong with that process. > > I bet they still have the old ticket data if someone wanted to calculate > their failure rate. Totally agree. And that's why I recommend using VMs and/or making backups. For the 100's (1,000's?) of times that it works, there's the one that doesn't. And that one is gonna hurt. - Robert
Re: [PLUG] Ubuntu LTS upgrade timing
If you don’t have a lot of weird stuff installed, the upgrades should be painless, and are usually more painless if you do them relatively soon, late enough for the kinks to be found, but not long enough for stuff to get too old, that’s when the real issues come up, often a case of key servers and whatnot. Of some relevance may be Rolling Rhino coming up, and another alternative that has kept my 20 year old Lenovo x220 chugging along, is plain old vanilla Arch Linux, with its rolling release. On Thu, Apr 14, 2022 at 10:38 AM ANTHONY SCHLEMMER wrote: > I am facing the same issue. I my own a laptop running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. I > know is still good until April of 2026 and I do not want to upgrade if I > can help it. I am running the same version of Ubuntu under Virtual Box for > work and my work laptop is Windows 10. > > I guess I should store all of my critical data which I have done in the > past and start from scratch to my upgrade to a newer version of LTS. My > work laptop lease rolls every three years so hopefully the IT support folks > give me access my old laptop over our network to copy all of the file for > Virtual Box over to my new laptop. > > Tony > > > On 04/13/2022 8:22 PM Keith Lofstrom wrote: > > > > > > After decades of Redhat/CentOS (and recent unwelcome IBM > > "stream" ephemeralizations, opposite of LTS) I am > > transitioning my systems to Mate-Ubuntu LTS. > > > > > > > > Questions for you folks with years of Ubuntu experience: > > > > 1) How easy/fraught is a dist-upgrade, say 16.04 to 20.04? > > > > 2) Should I wait for 22.04.1 (estimated 3+ months from > > now) before playing with 22.04 Jammy? > > > > > > > > 22.04 Jammy is in beta, and allegedly full release in a few > > days, but experiments with the beta haven't worked well. > > I have two test machines running 20.04.4 Focal; those work > > reliably. I hope to complete my transitions "soon", rather > > than create more content using CentOS. > > > > I prefer to install distros with (eventually) two more years > > years of LTS/Security updates, but not if that is more work > > now than a major dist-upgrade later ... for example, moving > > all systems from 20.04.x to 26.04.1 in 4.3 years. > > > > Keith > > > > Note: as my predilection for Mate attests, I have no > > interest in fashionable user interfaces. Most of my > > hardware and content and creations are also "classic > > hack". Terabyte solid state drives in 20 yo laptops > > containing some documents and images I created 50 yo. > > Some will transform the world a century from now. > > > > -- > > Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com >
Re: [PLUG] Ubuntu LTS upgrade timing
I am facing the same issue. I my own a laptop running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. I know is still good until April of 2026 and I do not want to upgrade if I can help it. I am running the same version of Ubuntu under Virtual Box for work and my work laptop is Windows 10. I guess I should store all of my critical data which I have done in the past and start from scratch to my upgrade to a newer version of LTS. My work laptop lease rolls every three years so hopefully the IT support folks give me access my old laptop over our network to copy all of the file for Virtual Box over to my new laptop. Tony > On 04/13/2022 8:22 PM Keith Lofstrom wrote: > > > After decades of Redhat/CentOS (and recent unwelcome IBM > "stream" ephemeralizations, opposite of LTS) I am > transitioning my systems to Mate-Ubuntu LTS. > > > > Questions for you folks with years of Ubuntu experience: > > 1) How easy/fraught is a dist-upgrade, say 16.04 to 20.04? > > 2) Should I wait for 22.04.1 (estimated 3+ months from > now) before playing with 22.04 Jammy? > > > > 22.04 Jammy is in beta, and allegedly full release in a few > days, but experiments with the beta haven't worked well. > I have two test machines running 20.04.4 Focal; those work > reliably. I hope to complete my transitions "soon", rather > than create more content using CentOS. > > I prefer to install distros with (eventually) two more years > years of LTS/Security updates, but not if that is more work > now than a major dist-upgrade later ... for example, moving > all systems from 20.04.x to 26.04.1 in 4.3 years. > > Keith > > Note: as my predilection for Mate attests, I have no > interest in fashionable user interfaces. Most of my > hardware and content and creations are also "classic > hack". Terabyte solid state drives in 20 yo laptops > containing some documents and images I created 50 yo. > Some will transform the world a century from now. > > -- > Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
Re: [PLUG] Ubuntu LTS upgrade timing
> Is it a good idea to keep upgrading? That is another question - > probably not a good idea to keep doing it. This and many other forums > are full of horror stories about dealing with the accumulated config > junk left over from the dist upgrades. but there are also horror stories of migrating application data from an old server to a new one. i can tell you a few. i am not disagreeing with you; rock and hard place. we've been forward migrating debians happily for a long time, ubuntus a bit less happily, and freebsd has become hell, driving us away from freebsd. randy
Re: [PLUG] Ubuntu LTS upgrade timing
On Thu, Apr 14, 2022 at 12:52 AM TomasK wrote: > On Wed, 2022-04-13 at 20:22 -0700, Keith Lofstrom wrote: > > Questions for you folks with years of Ubuntu experience: > > > > 1) How easy/fraught is a dist-upgrade, say 16.04 to 20.04? > > > It is easy to go from one LTS to the next: 16.04 --> 18.04 --> 20.04 I used to do that and never had an issue. But I do not have an extremely customized set up. I first install in a VM to update and verify my install flow, then on a > test machine - then I deploy it everywhere. There is plenty of support > overlap to do that at my own pace. A variation on that theme is to have a thin OS running a hypervisor on the bare hardware and run everything else in a VM. VMs make upgrades really painless, especially if using tools like Vagrant and a configuration manager like Ansible. But even if you’re not using those tools, VMs are nice for snapshotting, upgrading, testing, cloning, migrating, and reverting, if necessary. Of course, you could always use your favorite backup/restore utility, if not using a VM. Regards, - Robert
Re: [PLUG] Ubuntu LTS upgrade timing
On Wed, 13 Apr 2022, Keith Lofstrom wrote: After decades of Redhat/CentOS (and recent unwelcome IBM "stream" ephemeralizations, opposite of LTS) I am transitioning my systems to Mate-Ubuntu LTS. Questions for you folks with years of Ubuntu experience: 1) How easy/fraught is a dist-upgrade, say 16.04 to 20.04? It's pretty easy, and I've never had a machine fail from a dist upgrade. That said, once you've gone from 16.04 to 20.04 you will find yourself dealing with unexpected problems and dead-ends. I usually allow myself one major upgrade before a full reinstallation. 2) Should I wait for 22.04.1 (estimated 3+ months from now) before playing with 22.04 Jammy? I've got a jammy VM running and it's in pretty good shape. I've noticed at least one package on which I rely, bacula, hasn't yet made its way to jammy, but I suspect it will before the final release. If I had a system that was currently working, I'd wait until 22.04.0 was released and use it rather than, say, installing 20.04.x and then upgrade. If you've got multiple filesystems (rather than just a big root partition), you might consider using ZFS for them. The Ubuntu ZFS implementation has for me been very stable, and I find it far more useful than LVM + ext/xfs. These days, I use Ubuntu strictly on servers, so my experience of desktop Ubuntu is no longer relevant. But I think I read that jammy will complete the move to Wayland, away from X11. You may need to research how or if that will impact you. -- Paul Heinlein heinl...@madboa.com 45°22'48" N, 122°35'36" W
Re: [PLUG] Ubuntu LTS upgrade timing
On Wed, 2022-04-13 at 20:22 -0700, Keith Lofstrom wrote: > Questions for you folks with years of Ubuntu experience: > > 1) How easy/fraught is a dist-upgrade, say 16.04 to 20.04? > It is easy to go from one LTS to the next: 16.04 --> 18.04 --> 20.04 Is it a good idea to keep upgrading? That is another question - probably not a good idea to keep doing it. This and many other forums are full of horror stories about dealing with the accumulated config junk left over from the dist upgrades. Trying to be data driven and unbiased - You can count number of John's emails related to config/behavior issues versus any other Ubuntu from scratch issues. You can do the same on Ubuntu forums - it ain't pretty. I value my time, sanity and opportunity to learn new stuff as well as to test backup and my install notes/automation - So, I install from scratch. I first install in a VM to update and verify my install flow, then on a test machine - then I deploy it everywhere. There is plenty of support overlap to do that at my own pace. Of course different people do/value things differently, Tomas
[PLUG] Ubuntu LTS upgrade timing
After decades of Redhat/CentOS (and recent unwelcome IBM "stream" ephemeralizations, opposite of LTS) I am transitioning my systems to Mate-Ubuntu LTS. Questions for you folks with years of Ubuntu experience: 1) How easy/fraught is a dist-upgrade, say 16.04 to 20.04? 2) Should I wait for 22.04.1 (estimated 3+ months from now) before playing with 22.04 Jammy? 22.04 Jammy is in beta, and allegedly full release in a few days, but experiments with the beta haven't worked well. I have two test machines running 20.04.4 Focal; those work reliably. I hope to complete my transitions "soon", rather than create more content using CentOS. I prefer to install distros with (eventually) two more years years of LTS/Security updates, but not if that is more work now than a major dist-upgrade later ... for example, moving all systems from 20.04.x to 26.04.1 in 4.3 years. Keith Note: as my predilection for Mate attests, I have no interest in fashionable user interfaces. Most of my hardware and content and creations are also "classic hack". Terabyte solid state drives in 20 yo laptops containing some documents and images I created 50 yo. Some will transform the world a century from now. -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
