Focal Testing of Kubuntu 20.04 LTS

[jlittle]

A word of warning... a new Ubuntu-based release, early in the release process, will start not much different from the previous release. I imagine the repo is cloned, then the release devs set to work. A big, breaking, change can land at any time. I recall a Kubuntu that became unstable only about a week before the release date (at least on my hardware).

Thanks to the trail blazing work of the KDE Neon folks I'm not expecting KDE problems at any time in 20.04, but upstream in Ubuntu who knows. Running both as many do here keeps a foot in both camps, but keeping both up to date can be a chore.

[MeMyself]

I love the sound of the input in relation to 20.04! As someone who finally dumped Win10 and went full time Kubuntu, I'm excited to get to 20.04. I'm currently running 19.10 and love it. If I were to get brave and try upgrading is there a command line that I can use as I did for the move to 19.10? My one reservation as someone who loves running Beta and testing - is I have one program running in WINE that I'd be concerned about messing up. It had no problems with the upgrades to 19.04 or to 19.10, nor with the WINE upgrades to the weekly RC.

[NoWorries]

It is now 4 months to the release of Focal.

I am continuing to find this distribution very stable and have no hesitation to use it as my production system.

As I use the Pre-release updates with additional repositories for the latest kernel and plasma, I get:

	5 Months to go	4 Months to go
KDE Plasma Version	5.17.3	5.17.4
KDE Frameworks Version	5.64.0	5.65.0
QT Version	5.12.5	5.12.5
Kernel Version	5.4.0-6-generic	5.4.0-9-generic

As you can see, Focal LTS is advancing on all major fronts with the exception of the QT Version. This table only highlights the major developments, but I am very happy with the progress being made in other areas such as VLC, LibreOffice, Gimp and Kdenlive. As I use the improved features in these applications regularly, it is the main reason I always use the latest distribution.

[GreyGeek]

That's my evaluation as well. I was planning to wait until it went gold next March, but it is running so good I'll probably install it before New Year. My first Kubuntu was 9.04, which I installed in the last of January or 09, was rock solid and gave me no problems. Ditto for 14.04. So was 18.04. Seems to be a pattern!

[Don B. Cilly]

So I played with it a little more.
It looks rock solid, everything - admittedly not a lot, I didn't really install much stuff on it - worked perfectly.
I didn't notice any xapian index system freezes, kwin did not crash - which on 18.04 it tended to do for the first few runs, and then settle down - once.
Nvidia driver, it got the 430.50 at installation, no issues.
Even Baloo did not rear its fat head at all. Very smooth.

I almost decided to install all my stuff on it and start to use it at my main OS... except I'm kind of crazy, so I cannot have something called "Focal Fossa" running as an everyday tool

[Don B. Cilly]

Played with it a bit. It seems exceptionally well-behaved :·)
It didn't do the xapian-cripple thing at boot.
Maybe because I did the updates myself... it got 4 MB of updates total
Well, it was a daily-build and I only got it last night...

I copied my Neon /home to it, installed some essentials, so far it looks... tip-top

[Don B. Cilly]

I managed to install it.
It "only" took some 45 minutes. From a RAM-mounted ISO to an SSD, on a quad-core 2GHz processor. In the words of an English queen of pure German blood, "We are not amused".
Considering also that it was a minimal installation, with no pre-downloading of updates.

I don't know whether it was re-downloading the ISO, putting it on a separate disk, or letting it unmount all partitions. I guess the last one.
Which of course I could do because it was on a separate disk and I only trusted the RAM-mounting so far.

Anyway, I'll check it out and report any ... and other things :·)

[Don B. Cilly]

Failure reports 3 and 4:
I tried the toram - which I can't help but call tattycoram - option :·)
It seems to like it as much as the original Tattycoram liked people calling her that...

I tried to let it stew a while before installing. Not much change.
Even with the Updates icon in place, wait time at "Disk setup" went from five to four mintues.
I still think having an update-system-hog at two minutes after boot is rather... well... particularly on an installer... but... oh well.

It complained about mounted partitions. (it specifically said "copying ISO to RAM... done, at boot).
Then it said, application is in use on partition (sdc2 I presume, the ISO is there, even though it's in RAM)... I don't plan on letting it touch that partition anyway...
It was KSysguard. I closed it. It let me do Disk Setup.

Gets to Installing... just as before, Detecting filesystems, 100%, the "Kubuntu is nice", "You'll love it", Get on the bus" splash screens cycle happily, but after 20 minutes it's still "detecting filesystems, 100%".
Are you sure you want to quit the installer? Yes please. Do it again... No, you have to reboot, you used the tattycoram option, I don't like you.

So I reboot, retry the install, don't open KSysguard, allow it to format my already formatted partition, try to avoid anything that might confuse it.
Same result.

I'll try
- Downloading and checksumming the ISO again.
- Put it on a different disk.
and see what it does.

[jglen490]

In my opinion, the security risk for having an active internet connection open during an install, is no different from any other internet connected activity.

I may have deliberately not connected once or twice during the 25+ years that I've installed and upgraded Linux and BSD distros. The time it took to install a complete Linux/BSD is no different, and security exposure is no different. Your system is hitting the same repos - which are either trustworthy or not trustworthy.

While it's true that I've dropped internet connections from time to time, but - again in my opinion - those were not related to the actual install/upgrade.

I've had some bad downloads of ISOs, bad that's just the way it goes, and those become apparent pretty quickly.

[Radcliff]

Off-line

We also disconnect Internet for a fresh install, the desktop setup is made before enabling Internet.
No need to run live CD for Focal daily builds.

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

For Windows, full setup is made off-line, we don't even touch check for update after. A source of noise there.

[NoWorries]

I've always activated the internet connection and never had a problem with installs. (I just screw things up later)

Like you, I always activate my internet connection during the install and have not had any trouble. I must confess that I am connected to my router by Ethernet, and the router is connected to a fibre termination on the wall in my study.

Even when I do an install with no Ethernet but Wireless, I set up the wireless connection during the install. I have noticed that the installation downloads quite a few packages before it is finished.

[jlittle]

I *NEVER* activate an Internet connection when I do an install.

Neither do I, but... I suspect it's a habit I learned more than a decade and a half ago, when downloads were much slower and much less reliable. I was stung a couple of times with screwed up installs from something going wrong with the downloading. I seem to remember that one was caused by disconnections, and the other was due to something at the mirror I was using.

I imagine that like the installer says, updating as part of the install would save time. But if something goes wrong I want to see the error messages, and if the updating is occurring behind the flashy installer GUI, it's possible I won't get to see them.

[SpecialEd]

I've always activated the internet connection and never had a problem with installs. (I just screw things up later)

[Don B. Cilly]

Oh, I don't know... I've installed roughly 65535 ;·) distros over the last two centuries - millennia actually - with active internet connections, and they all pretty much worked... :·)

[Snowhog]

I *NEVER* activate an Internet connection when I do an install.

Ditto. Install *ONLY* from the .iso, then after you are on the Desktop, open a konsole and perform and apt update and apt full-upgrade, then activate the other repositories and repeat. Never fails. Never.