General advice on Ubuntu upgrades

Question

Running XPS 9360 with Ubuntu 16.04. I'm not in a big hurry to upgrade to 18.04, but I'll need to try it within 6 months or so because of the work I do. I was wondering if anyone on the forum has experience enough to estimate when Dell starts to move up to the current LTS release in the units they sell. The main issue, as I see it, is several drivers and kernel modules Dell adds to make the machine work properly. Mine works just dandy, once I fiddled with the touchpad config. On the one hand, I suppose the newer kernel will resolve some of that, but I suspect at least some of Dell's drivers are unique to the specific machine. I'm not sure the Xenial drivers will work with Bionic as they are, and I'm not too eager to test it out.

Can anyone advise me?

CliffBooth · Answer

Question could probably marked as resolved or irrelevant now that Dell is actually actively on 18.04.2 LTS. But since the title is General advice, could someone from Dell, please, officially and definitely tell what the pros and cons are to moving out of this LTS fetish? 19.04 just came out and it seems weird to stick with software that is a year old, and miss out on (among other things): performance and compatibility improvements, a huge Gnome Shell update, all the latest apps, etc... Aside from the Dell repository, what am I really missing if I upgrade to 19.04 (theoretically), or is it really just that I will have bad luck if I require Dell's support on a software issue and they'll then say 'sorry buddy, we only deal with LTS'? If it's just that... then I'll upgrade.... Thanks!

speedstep · Answer

Burning a DVD at 1X or 2X or 4X max and installing offline has always been my approach.

I also always use USB 2.0 optical drive BP50NB40 .

http://releases.ubuntu.com/18.04/ubuntu-18.04.2-desktop-amd64.iso

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/lg-8x-external-usb-2-0-blu-ray-disc-double-layer-dvdrw-cd-rw-disc-rewriter-black/9243009.p?skuId=9243009

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General advice on Ubuntu upgrades

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