I have used popos for many years on my desktop and laptop and I’m a little worried about upgrading to the 24.04 version and was planning to wait until mid Jan. when hopefully the upgrade will be officially “stable”, i.e. with a nice little upgrade-notification. But now Spotify has released a version that requires a newer version of glibc so currently the apt-version of Spotify won’t run on my machines. So, how has it been for you? Have you upgraded without problems or did you do a fresh install ?
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I’ve done it on 2 machines now and I’ve had absolutely 0/2 luck upgrading.
The first one restarted and dropped me down to a try shell after the upgrade with nothing more, and I had to use chatgpt to be able to fix it. I had forgotten that I tried cinnamon years ago and so it got confused selecting the old greeter or the new and just didn’t pick any. Then none of the cosmic apps were installed. Very very rocky experience.
The dropped me back to a try as well, but I had never customized this one so I was even more confused what went wrong and still don’t know. That upgrade screwed up local authentication so much that even using a live cd to repair it didn’t work, so I was forced to fresh install.
I love pop, but this is not a good upgrade experience at all
I installed 24.04 fresh on a new machine, and I’d say it’s more stable than 22.04, but has a lot more “weirdness”.
Positives:
- On 22.04, it seemed like frozen programs had a habit of crashing the entire desktop environment. That doesn’t seem to happen on 24.04.
- Like you mentioned, it seems to use new versions of many dependencies, so I’ve run into less issues installing certain programs.
Negatives:
- For whatever reason, I can no longer use Shift or Ctrl to move or copy a file. Instead of dragging a file while holding shift, I have to cut and paste it to move it. This sounds minor, but it’s deceptively annoying, and affects all programs.
- A bunch of the keyboard shortcuts (particularly in the tiling window manager) were changed. For example, there’s now two different shortcuts to expand or shrink windows.
- The dock will just randomly stop working (i.e. it doesn’t appear when you hover against the edge of the screen). The only way I’ve found to fix it is to reset the dock preferences.
- Default apps will randomly reset.
- COSMIC seems to be more prone to keeping the display turned on while on the lock screen, even when configured to sleep. This isn’t a huge deal, but it’s a bit annoying with an OLED.
I upgraded in October and ended up going back. Some issues I had were:
Constant freezing
Some apps such as VLC taking a long time to open
After a week or so my dock stopped working completely
Tiling was really messed up for me. Windows would not snap correctly into sections
It wouldn’t ever remember my monitor configuration. Every time I’d want the device from sleep I had to reset things like resolution, scaling, etc
Those are just a few things off the top of my head. And this was also early October. They may have fixed those things by now. My plan is to upgrade next fall and if those issues still aren’t fixed for me then I am headed to another distro.
So if I were you, I’d make sure you have a proper backup, and just got back if you need to.
Yeah, maybe I’ll take some time and make sure to actually restore from backups before I do the upgrade. And maybe I’ll go for the fresh install instead and try make sure that all my unfinished projects/dotfiles etc are up to date on my remote git server so that I can bring them back one by one. The Spotify thing is irritating though… I am building a little Spotify game and both the dev (on my desktop and laptop) and the actual server has been on U22.04 based systems.
I’m not on PopOS, but as a general rule of thumb always do a backup before a major version upgrade. Better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.
Yeah, I have backups of /home and have switched from almost all distros through the years and have made things work. But this is the first time I’ve actually cared about my setup since maybe an early gentoo install on an old laptop 20 years ago that I really put a lot of time and love in :)
I’m sure I saw in one of the blogs they plan on starting prompting for upgrades in January, maybe they’ve given themselves time to work on the upgrade path.
No problems updating on my machine, the whole process was smooth and painless. I do however think Cosmic could use more time in the oven as in its current form it doesn’t feel and work as well as GNOME did for me.
It’s not unusable mind you but it’s missing polish, some settings either don’t exist (night light) or aren’t as robust as before (I can’t use numpad numbers for keyboard shortcuts for example) and certain apps aren’t as good in my opinion (I regularly switch between COSMIC files and the old file explorer). I’m also used to my old workflow so I’ll need some time to figure out the best setup going forward.
It’s stable but not 100% ready in my experience.
