Chris WiegmanAfter work yesterday I wiped my Framework laptop, which has been running just fine on Ubuntu 22.04 for almost a year, and installed the new Ubuntu 24.04 that was just released. It was, if I’m being honest, one of the least problematic OS upgrades I’ve done in a long time.
Historically I’ve learned to never do major OS upgrades. This goes back to my Windows days (I stopped using Windows in 2008) and carried through right with Mac and then Linux. For all the claims of how “easy” it is to do major OS upgrades I’ve just never found any system that maintains stability over time when the OS is upgraded like that.
Frankly I’m OK with this. It gives me a chance to “reset” my machines and clear off the cruft. None of my machines, Mac or Linux, take more than 2 hours to upgrade like this as I’ve scripted the setup to a very large degree on both.
Back to Ubuntu…
While I’ve had a few app crashes, as I expect on literally any OS upgrade anymore, everything really did just work. On 22.04 I had to do a little extra to get the fingerprint reader and a few other things working. On 24.04 it was all just there. Even my Brother printer showed up right away, ready to print.
I still can’t move back to Linux full-time, I simply rely on way too much on iCloud these days with my family, but it’s getting close. Purely as an OS (before you get into all the packaging issues with modern Linux distros) Ubuntu and other modern Linux systems really do “just work” in a way Mac hasn’t since the early 2010s. It’s so refreshing to be able to just “use” a machine” and not have to fight it.