Should I upgrade [now that 14.10 is in EOL]?

[Guest]

Does anyone had a pleasant upgrade by now? I had postponed the upgrade, but now 14.10 is unsupported and I'm receiving no critical upgrades. Do you know if upgrade bugs were fixed? Which?

I'm a bit scared by this post:
http://www.tutorialgeek.net/2015/04/...88787266308750

I started with Kubuntu 7.04 and upgraded it till 8.04, but was afraid of upgrading from 8.04 to 8.10, which introduced KDE 4. So, when 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) arrived, I did a clean install in another partition. Then, due to many upgrade problems, the possibility to upgrade from KDE 3 to 4 was cancelled.

I'm upgrading since Kubuntu 10.10 and it was never a seamless process. From 13.10 to 14.04, I was left with no keyboard and a broken KDE installation, and had to fix the issues by composing commands by copying and pasting letter by letter to the terminal...

Now, I'm quite afraid of breaking everything by upgrading 14.10 to 15.04, due to the transition from KDE 4 to KDE 5. As other users, I'm a bit sick of doing so many upgrades and having to deal with the issues... I could stick with LTS versions (as I do in other computers), but I'm afraid that the transition from KDE 4 to KDE 5 in the next LTS version will not be free of problems (supposing it will be possible).

I'm considering trying a rolling release distro, or giving up KDE, as doing a clean install every 6 months seems too much trouble to me.

[oshunluvr]

I use 15.04 daily and frankly, if you're looking for a stable experience you'd be better off waiting to upgrade or going back to 14.04. Just like when we jumped from KDE 3 to 4 there's still a myriad of issues.

As far as upgrading vs. new install, I've done both. I usually prefer the new install because I keep a backup install anyway - so why not the last version? I agree upgrading was a problem in the past, but since 11.10, I've had no issues when I've done it. My current install was an upgrade from 14.10 and I kept 14.04 as my backup. I have a couple small issues that I don't often see reported with new installs. My advice? If you're going forward to 15.04 now - suffer through the new install.

I too have been browsing for a rolling distro but haven't seen any that give me the amount of available packages the Kubuntu has. KaOS looks interesting if you want rolling and lean. Not much there package wise so you'll be doing some binary installs but that's not the end of the world either. I'm think I'm too addicted to the package depth and ease of .deb installs to change at this point...

[claydoh]

Actually, 'downgrading" to 14.04, with the kubuntu-backports ppa nets you pretty much the same KDE bits as 14.10 would provide, as far as I can tell. Newer releases of 14.04 LTS provide the 'lts enablement stack' by default, which gives you later kernels and xorg, Vivid's iirc (but you can choose which ones to run)

You would have to install fresh, though.

[jlittle]

I was like you and took the plunge a few days ago. I had a lot of trouble, the release upgrade had several problems and resulted in a KDE I couldn't login to. So I did a clean install to another partition, and that took hours to find workarounds for a couple of problems.
Both the upgrade and the clean install tripped badly (in different ways) on my old motherboard with its NVidia GPU.
I've since found a workaround for the upgraded install that lets it login, and I'm using that, because it surprisingly retains a desktop effect I can't get in the clean install.
Both started really ugly IMO. The new and only theme follows UI fashion somewhat (f. ex. flat, simple icons) and, well, I'll suppress the rant. In trying to customize (this is KDE, right?) back to something I like I've found missing features and flakiness. KDE 5 is an alpha quality release in 15.04.
So I'd suggest installing 14.04 LTS, in a separate partition so you can refer back to the 14.10 install. You'd have to set everything up again, but you're in for a lot of that anyway.

[mparillo]

There is no direct "upgrade" path from a Plasma 4 Kubuntu to Plasma 5. Only save your data, clean install, restore your data.

[joneall]

Plasma 5 LOOKS great. But I have at least one plasma crash a day. When that happens, I usually have to reboot. I still have 14.10, which I will use until it breaks (It hasn't yet.) and then back to 14.04, which I also have.

I also have Debian and think it is not bad. Not as up-to-date, but not as flakey, either. My main complaint is with the renamed Firefox and Thunderbird. No huge deal.