is 17.04 completely dead?

[SumBloke]

Hi everyone
I am using 17.04 and finding it EXTREMELY difficult to do ANYTHING!!

Really gettng discouraged and thinking of throwing in the towel and going back to Windows. It is just too difficult to do anything and almost a full time job to keep everything running and up to date, just to run basic apps! Can anyone confirm please if I am misunderstanding the following points:

1 You cantt run new - 2021 appimages on 17.04? I try and nothing happens. Yes, I have made them bootable.
2 You can't update 17.04 from the repositories, the 17.04 respositories have all been shut down?
3 You cant just upgrade 17.04 to the latest version, you have to do a new, fresh install and then try and recover all your apps without losing anything. You'll need to buy a new hard drive to do this safely!
4 You cant install anything from any respositories, if you havent already installed it before the 17.04 repositories were shut down, tough luck and see number 3 above!

Im not sure if you can look up my previous topics, but each of the 4 points above has an extensive topic on it, each of them Ive found very very difficult on thier own and not been successful despite receiving lots of help from people in here. It's nuts how complext this is!

And just to say, I have over 35 nealy 40 years experience using computers and have worked full time on them for 25 years. So if its this hard for me, what hope is there for normal users - non-totally-dedicated-enthusiasts? Is there any point to Linux unless you are one of those?

Fed up! :-(

[Snowhog]

17.04 became EOL January 13, 2018.

[jglen490]

Just like everything else in life, change is inevitable. It's important to understand the ground rules of each of the Linux distros, and to follow them.

And as Snowhog noted, yes 17.04 is dead. Kubuntu 20.04 LTS is alive and well as is Kubuntu 20.10.

[jlittle]

3 You cant just upgrade 17.04 to the latest version, you have to do a new, fresh install and then try and recover all your apps without losing anything.

Firstly, have a look at EOLUpgrades in the community wiki. I've never done it, but IIRC some folks here (in this forum) have.

Secondly, if most of your apps are in appimages, you're better off than if they weren't. Those apps won't need reinstalling.

And third, there's other approaches:

1. A "new, fresh install" may not be needed; an "unclean" install over the top of 17.04 might work.
2. One can install Kubuntu to a USB stick these days, if your hardware will let you. The result might be a bit slow to boot, but would give flexibility. How big is the existing root? (Just ask if you'd like to know how to determine that.)
3. You may be able to shrink the existing partitions to make room for a new root partition to install to. All you need is about 20 GB. If /home is a separate partition, as would be typical, it can be left alone and used as the new /home.
4. This approach might be a stretch, but if the filesystem is btrfs, you could have both the old and new versions installed in the same partition. (I do that all the time.) We can help sort that out.

Of course, everyone will advise to have good backups, but you hint you don't have the storage for that...

[Bings]

Yeah, if your 4+ year old hard drive is the single place your data is stored, you are wide open to losing it all from a hard drive failure. Would strongly recommend some form of external storage regardless of anything else

The number points are answered above but just like to say installing Kubuntu 20.04 from scratch is super quick and easy. If you install it with the BTRFS file system then you have amazing snapshot backups built in. It will also be a great step up from the Kubuntu you have.

[oshunluvr]

Yeah, if your 4+ year old hard drive is the single place your data is stored, you are wide open to losing it all from a hard drive failure. Would strongly recommend some form of external storage regardless of anything else

The number points are answered above but just like to say installing Kubuntu 20.04 from scratch is super quick and easy. If you install it with the BTRFS file system then you have amazing snapshot backups built in. It will also be a great step up from the Kubuntu you have.

Agreed on all points.

[claydoh]

Upgrading, after adjusting the sources to point to where the old repos are archived, may not be possible from 17.04. The path would be 17.04 >> 17.10 >> 18.04 >> 20.04. Too many upgrades, even if it is possible to upgrade to 17.10 to begin with (which I highly doubt).
Better to install 20.04 which is LTS, and has a much longer lifespan - three years of support for Plasma, but 5 years for the actual OS, so the repo will not be archived until 2025.
Non LTS releases only live for 9 months. it is expected for these users to upgrade every 6 months.

[GreyGeek]

@Oshunluver: Ditto!