[kwlug-disc] Xubuntu 22.04 to 24.04 Upgrade

[Charles M]

This morning one of our Xubuntu 22.04 workstations at Computer
Recycling prompted us to upgrade to 24.04 (the 24.04.1 point release
came out August 30th). Since the machine isn't mission critical I
decided to try the upgrade to see how painful it might be.

The machine didn't have any PPAs (Personal Package Archives), or other
sources, but did have snaps for antsy-alien-attack-pico (a pico-8
shoot 'em up by Martin Wimpress/Ubuntu Mate), blender (3d modeling),
freac (a great little audio cd-ripping program), krita (paint), and
the office 365 webapps, in addition to the Firefox and Chromium snaps
22.04 came with.

Only 1 program was listed as unsupported (Cheese, we install this
webcam program as an extra on all machines so we can test out webcams
on laptops). Oddly, after the install cheese was still installed on
the system, and from what I can tell they didn't switch to a snap,
it's still from the ubuntu universe repository.

The update went pretty uneventful. There was a bit of prompting for
some of the extra packages we had installed (ms truetype fonts). On
reboot I noticed an exclamation mark in the top right corner, but no
crashing (the machine is a custom system with a Z270X-UD3 motherboard,
7th gen i7-7700K, 16GB, and an SSD). The issue was some broken
dependencies for a kernel. Right clicking gave some instructions for
fixing the issue. Ultimately a sudo apt --fix-broken install -y fixed
that issue.

I also noticed the "software" centre was missing, and the upgrade had
not replaced it with the snap store (if you do a fresh install of
24.04 you will get the snap store). Instead, synaptic and gdebi were
present.

Thunderbird got replaced with a snap, but afaik this is the only
program that we didn't install that got a snap replacement (FF and
Chromium were snaps in 22.04).

Snaps are still underpinning 24.04.1. It looks like I could just
install the snap store with sudo snap install snap-store. On other
machines where we've installed 24.04.1 we've noticed that the snap
store is a lot faster than Gnome software - faster starting, faster
populating, and faster searching. With this point release I noticed
that they seemed to have added a differentiation between snaps and apt
packages (before the point release it just seemed to be all snaps).

That's all I have for now. I'll be upgrading a bunch more machines, so
I expect I might have some updates to report.

Cheers,

Charles