I went through a small predicament and I thought it’s nice to note it down. Also, it coincides with the 20th anniversary of Ubuntu Linux.
Ubuntu served me well for more than a decade. Readers of this blog might know I was a Mac user. Although I had tried a few Linux distros several times before that, the first serious use (but not exclusive use) of Linux was in 2007. At that point, my distro of choice was Ubuntu. I passed through many controversial things: the GNOME 2 to Unity transition, the Sys-V to systemd transition, the Unity to GNOME 3 transition, the introduction (and forced usage) of snap packages… But today’s topic is less controversial than these.
I am a big fan of LTS releases. In my opinion, several of the recent LTS releases were quite good (10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, 22). I have many fond memory of these releases because they were the distros during my “transition” to my current position as the so-called computational researcher. I still remember Ubuntu 10.04 LTS as being super stable and the server of the massive data collection project I did during my time at HKU depended on it.
Having said that, I still think that system updates even for LTS releases are still a bit risky. This perception is probably not very rational, as most of the system updates were smooth. But I have a negative bias of only remembering the bad ones. The latest of these bad ones was Ubuntu 22.04 to 24.04. A small tale to tell here is that my team lead actually went through this update before my update. He got an unbootable machine.
The long story short was, I received an OS with borked network devices after the upgrade. Perhaps slightly better than a unbootable machine, but equally unusable (and fixable) because most operations for just diagnosing what’s going on would need the internet access. So my choices are limited. I made another backup of the machine on a USB hard drive 1.
My first step was to take the opportunity to switch to something else. I tried Fedora i3 Spin. While it was cool to have an extremely efficient distro with i3, it still had many quacks to fix. There were minor ones such as the difference between ffmpeg-free and ffmppeg-libs and their impact on video playback on Youtube; the incompatibility of xclip with reprex. A relatively minor issue was I could not get the rendering setup for this blog to work on fedora. But this is likely to be fixable. The issue that made me think Fedora could not be my daily driver came when I found that the Sonic Wall VPN client on Fedora was not compatible with my cooperation’s intranet (which I am supposed to use daily). As Sonic Wall is a proprietary software, there is almost nothing I can change but to abandon Fedora.
I had to switch back to Ubuntu Linux. So, my first choice was the latest LTS 24.04. The installation was okay this time. But there was an issue related to mounting NTFS partitions. Interestingly enough, my team lead also experienced something similar.
So, another installation, this time was LTS 22.04. And well, back to the square one and everything’s working. As you can see, I can update this blog. Despite the issues, I still think that Ubuntu Linux is the most practical Linux distribution out there. The out of the box experience is still quite well. Only if the system update can be thoroughly tested, it would be wonderful.
One important tidbit, however, is that during the succession of the 3 Linux installations (22.04, 24.04, Fedora 40), I can get my emacs configuration to work reproducibly. It’s super amazing.
The whole thing wasted a week of my life.
I have a weekly backup of my machine via Deja Dup on Google Drive. But it’s slow to restore. Also, would it be nice to have two backups? ↩