Kubuntu 20.04 Install

[buster]

Yesterday I installed the 20.04 Kubuntu release. It had been released the day before. Some comments:

Install: Why do designers think it’s a good idea to have a blank screen while the install is going on? It was only because I was cooking that I let it run rather than trashing it. And then..... for the second half of the install it gave us garish wallpaper to stare at, with nothing else on the page, as if it had died.

The desktop: The first thing you have to do is change the wallpaper, unless you want to be shocked silly every time you close a large window. Fortunately there are at least a hundred choices. Everything looks clean and sharp â€" to my eyes very attractive. Many, many programs. Got Synaptic to download a few others I like. Dolphin is one of the best file managers I think.

Performance: Running on 2 gig ram and 1 cpu core it seems pretty snappy. Graphics good with games.

Updates: I downloaded and installed Kubuntu about 1 day after the release, and it told me there were updates! Either they are meticulous or sloppy. I think the former.

Overall Impression: Not sure why everyone doesn’t use this, unless of course he or she is running Mint.  I think it’s really good.

See attached image.

Maybe more later.

[fox]

Because some of us like vanilla Ubuntu with Gnome.

[Jason]

Install: Why do designers think it’s a good idea to have a blank screen while the install is going on? It was only because I was cooking that I let it run rather than trashing it. And then..... for the second half of the install it gave us garish wallpaper to stare at, with nothing else on the page, as if it had died.

Blank screen? Huh? I don't think I'ever had a blank screen during an install. I'm not sure what happened with yours, perhaps it wasn't picking up the video? Perhaps you forgot to turn the monitor on? ;-)

Overall Impression: Not sure why everyone doesn’t use this, unless of course he or she is running Mint.  I think it’s really good.

Nobody's perfect, Buster.

[Jason]

I'm going to run the upgrade tool outlined in the Kubuntu announcement at the bottom. But the team hasn't yet enabled upgrades yet. The note at the bottom says that it can take hours to a few days before that happens. I ran the command suggested to do the upgrade and it says there is no new release found yet so obviously it hasn't been upgraded.

As for meticulous or sloppy, keep in mind that Ubuntu is fed packages from Debian which has its own schedule. And Debian gets its packages from upstream package maintainers who likely have their own schedules. Some maintainers works for distro developers, most don't. It's a work of love. And under the maintainers, there are developers who contribute code. If they find something broken, they fix it. The maintainer decides what goes in, what doesn't and when to release a update for a package. Linux is a huge community. Ubuntu doesn't do everything or even most things. Neither does Debian. It's a system that shouldn't work but somehow does. Also, if there is a serious vulnerability, do you really want them to sit on an update just because you recently installed a fresh distro? I don't know if that happened in your case. You can check the release notes in your update tool to see what the update fixes before you install it. There's not a lot of into there and it may not make sense but if it's a security update, it will say so.

[fox]

I'm going to run the upgrade tool outlined in the Kubuntu announcement at the bottom. But the team hasn't yet enabled upgrades yet. The note at the bottom says that it can take hours to a few days before that happens. I ran the command suggested to do the upgrade and it says there is no new release found yet so obviously it hasn't been upgraded.
....

I forgot to mention that in upgrading Ubuntu 19.10, not one of my three computers with it installed notified me of the upgrade in Software Update. In all cases I had to upgrade from the command line with "do-release-upgrade -d". I was surprised about this because the upgrade notification is usually available when going from the latest non-LTS release. But it wasn't difficult to do the upgrade this way. Also, the reboot after upgrade hung up in all three cases, and I had to force a shutdown and then restart. But all was good after the restart. I have never had a serious problem upgrading Ubuntu and I've been doing this since version 7.04.

[Jason]

I forgot to mention that in upgrading Ubuntu 19.10, not one of my three computers with it installed notified me of the upgrade in Software Update. In all cases I had to upgrade from the command line with "do-release-upgrade -d". I was surprised about this because the upgrade notification is usually available when going from the latest non-LTS release.

Do you have the option set in your Software Sources to be notified of new distribution releases? It's under 'Show new distribution releases' on the 'update' tab. I wonder because I have it checked for 'normal releases' which sounds like anything that isn't LTS, but there is another option is 'long-term support releases only'. So does 'normal releases' in this case, mean everything? The third option is 'never'.

Regardless, I have as yet to get a notification. I don't think I got one for 19.10 either. I did a fresh install for it, anyway. 19.04 was also a fresh install because that's when I switched to Kubuntu from Mint.

You mentioned that you "have never had a serious problem upgrading Ubuntu and I've been doing this since version 7.04". Are you saying that you have upgraded one machine continually from 7.04? If so, I'm impressed. I would expect that there would be no problem unless you're using software that is outside the provided repos or have changed some guru settings in Ubuntu (e.g. via the command-line).

[fox]

Not on any one computer, but on my main office and home computer, I have had many years of continuous Ubuntu upgrades; maybe since 10.04?