After several days of trials, I've been itching to deploy Kubuntu 26.04 LTS to my Linux laptop, as it has so far seemed pretty OK, but with a bunch of cool new things...
This update covers:
* 1) First impressions of the new LTS
* 2) A whole bunch of niggly tech things I've learned in the past 24 hours, either from general poking around and/or from trying to upgrade my test laptop
First impressions of 26.04 LTS from a few days ago (inside a VM though):
* Boot up + restart seem faster (at least in my VM)
* The wobbly animations + translucency effects when moving windows are VERY annoying...
* The audio-crackling in VM's issue is finally resolved! (i.e. No more need for bringing up that stuff)
* On the whole, everything seems like a nice gentle step up from 25.10 (especially as it now includes the super-cool "day-night responsive wallpapers" that newer versions of Plasma now offer)
Tech things I've learned in the past day:
* 1) My laptop's "Legacy BIOS" mode doesn't like Kubuntu 26.04's new ISO, or the way it's set up. Perhaps as it uses GPT... Hence, it couldn't even see it, let alone try to boot off it.
(And of course, it had to be in Legacy Mode, otherwise some annoying "PXE" or Secure Boot related keys crap would stop anything else booting either)
* 2) Hopefully I'm not going to regret trying to upgrade it straight across "blind" like this. Then again, this laptop is practically a sacrificial testbed at this point
(Also, in the worse case, I've maintained the 25.10 USB stick that contains its current setup, so I could just reinstall that over the top again if all else fails I guess!)
The procedure I'm following for this is now:
a) sudo apt update
b) sudo apt --assume-yes full-upgrade
c) kubuntu-devel-release-upgrade
(As all other variants / alternatives to do this have failed)
* 3) KDE have a "isoimagewriter" tool for writing ISO's to a USB. Be warned though that that thing wants to see both the checksum AND the .gpg / pgp files... Using that still didn't work in this instance (again, as I suspect it's the whole GPT thing)
* 4) I also learned that KDE have an Inkscape alternative called "Karbon". Superficially, it looks a lot like a KDE version of Inkscape, but with all the shape-adding buttons missing! (*)
(*) Well actually... It actually just took me way too long to realise that there was in fact an "Add Shapes" toolbar button + popup from the top-right corner.... far away from where I'd been looking and coming up short! Correction: I didn't actually notice it, and had to look it up! Yay for a massive usability fail straight out of the box 😜
* 5) One other important system-setup thing: If you just transfer your ".config" and ".local" folders straight over from the Live USB to your new permanent setup, beware that the pinned / shortcut places in Dolphin all point to the wrong place (i.e. they point to the Live USB's "/home/kubuntu" folder instead of your own "/home/<username>"
Fortunately, you "only" have to go through each one, right-clicking and selecting "Edit" to fix this! But still, that's one reason why you may not want to do a wholesale copy, and may instead need a better setup
* 6) When doing VM testing (inside vmware), if Ubuntu/Kubuntu resume from boot and find that your shared drive(s) keep disappearing / not working after rebooting:
1) Ensure mount point exists
> sudo mkdir -p /mnt/hgfs
2) Open fstab file for editing
> sudo vi /etc/fstab
3) Add this line at the end
```
vmhgfs-fuse /mnt/hgfs fuse defaults,allow_other,_netdev 0 0
```
Notes:
* I still haven't verified what fstab entries I need to ad to ensure my internal HDD is always mounted on my laptop. Figuring that out will be important for my desktop workstations, as I've got those set up to store everything interesting off the SSD.
* I also still need to figure out the whole clipboard sharing situation between vmware and Linux guests, as I always stumble around a lot trying to get that working
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