My issues with installing Xubuntu 24.04 LTS

[Barney T. Administrators]

Hi Fellow Linux Enthusiasts!

I wanted to post about my difficulties with performing a fresh install of Xubuntu 24.04 (Noble Numbat) this past week. I am not a noob to Linux by any means. As I stated in other posts, I started with Red Hat 7 and tried almost every flavor except Arch and Gentoo. I have grown to love Linux and I consider it one of my main "go-to"  operating systems. I have never had much difficulty with installing most distros until now.

I prefer Xubuntu because I really like the XFCE-4 desktop manager, It is fast, clean, and just works. I was excited to try the new 24.04 LTS version and downloaded the 24.04 iso directly from the Xubuntu website. I'm an older user so I used the old-fashioned way of burning the .iso to a DVD and booting up from that. The Live CD took quite a while to boot up which was very unusual to me. My system was not old and the hardware was completely compatible. Finally, the desktop appeared and I clicked on "Install Xubuntu 24.04".

The CD whirred and whirred without anything happening for quite some time (maybe 4-5 minutes). Finally, the installer appeared. Clicking on my choices resulted in a very slow movement to the next screen. The installer selected a USB drive to install the OS instead of the main drive (SDA). That was quite unusual. I switched drives and did a full, clean install. On reboot with the CD removed, the normal desktop appeared. Immediately the desktop said that there were some updates. I clicked on the package manager installer (I also use apt and Synaptic) and nothing happened. Then I tried the usual "sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade". The packages were downloaded and installed without issues. Following that, the CLI said that some packages needed to be removed. I have never had an issue with this, so I said "Yes".  Autoremove went to work and removed the packages. On reboot, I got many, many errors. I was so disappointed. This system was truly flawed.

I reinstalled my Xubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish) and it works flawlessly. I was very disappointed and I do NOT recommend installing 24.04 until there are updates that fix these issues. I noted that many other users have had issues like this.

Member Max Norris has posted: Found that bug report. Apparently, it's SDDM breaking Plymouth and there's a patch available if you're a hands-on type of person. Me, meh it's on screen for like a second tops, I'll just disabled it till they patch it and add it to the repos. 
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/sddm/+bug/2065321

I hope that this helps others and wish everyone happy Linuxing!

[Kelxin]

I ran into so many issues with 24.04 that it's not even worth listing them.  Between upgrades, fresh installs, crashes, incompatibilities with software that works perfect on every previous version... 24.04 can't be called stable at all and I've given up on it entirely.

[macoman]

KDE is my preferred flavor that I like and usually Suse or Fedora but prefer Suse!

[Barney T. Administrators]

On 23/05/2024 at 10:40, Kelxin said:

I ran into so many issues with 24.04 that it's not even worth listing them.  Between upgrades, fresh installs, crashes, incompatibilities with software that works perfect on every previous version... 24.04 can't be called stable at all and I've given up on it entirely.

Completely agree!

[Brandon H Supervisor]

On 23/05/2024 at 09:40, Kelxin said:

I ran into so many issues with 24.04 that it's not even worth listing them.  Between upgrades, fresh installs, crashes, incompatibilities with software that works perfect on every previous version... 24.04 can't be called stable at all and I've given up on it entirely.

yeah I've heard similar from others as well. all *buntu 24.04 spins seem to be wildly unstable right now. Really bad for an LTS release.