upgrade from 22.04 LTS

[Anna Smith]

Hi, I'm quite new to kubuntu and I'm doing fine with version 22.04 LTS. I am thinking, with a lot of fear, to upgrade to 24.04 LTS, but I don't want to lose what I have installed and works for me. I don't want to lose Muon either...
Could someone explain me step by step how to upgrade? If possible by konsole.
Thanks.

[oshunluvr]

I understand your reticence. It's a bit scary to face what might be a massive change when you're just become accustom to how things work and all set up the way you want. First off, you don't have to upgrade. You just lose updates, support, and bug fixes from now on. If you do upgrade, you going to have to expect and accept changes. That's just how this works.

Muon, like any other freely developed piece of software, is subject to the wishes of the maintainer/developer in charge of the project. End users have no, or very little, say in how that goes. That's true when using any operation system, free or not.

You didn't give system details, but if you have space or more than one storage device, you could install Kubuntu 24.04 along side 22.04 and dual-boot. It you are using the BTRFS file system, it's extremely easy to just take a snapshot of your current system as it is, then upgrade, and restore back to the old version anytime you want. Another way to assuage your fears would be to boot to a LiveUSB session and actually use it for a period of time - days or weeks even. This would give you a taste of what you're heading for without forcing immediate change with no way to go back. Any of these are a way to let you gradually move toward the new version without taking a blind leap-of-faith.

Finally, as a Kubuntu user since 9.09, I can say with very few specific exceptions, every upgrade has been rather painless, and over the last several years the upgrade path has become even more reliable.

As far as the process itself goes, if you want to use the terminal it goes like this:

sudo apt update
sudo apt full-upgrade
sudo apt autoremove
sudo do-release-upgrade

I cannot stress enough the importance of having a verified backup before beginning the upgrade. You should be doing that anyway, but it's even more important to do it prior to a system change as large as a version upgrade.