I finally upgraded my “daily driver” system, an HP ProDesk 600 G1 SFF, from Ubuntu 22.04 to Ubuntu 24.04. The process went well, but I did have to do some cleanup work afterwards and not everything is working as it should..

This system had been functioning as a SAMBA server. The update disabled this, eliminating my changes to /etc/samba/smb.conf. I had to reconfigure SAMBA. Fortunately, I had documented this process in my Linux Configuration Notes. Going through this I had the system functioning again as a SAMBA server in a few minutes.

Ubuntu 24.04 provides the Thunderbird e-mail client as a Snap, rather than older .deb file format. So I had to configure it again for my e-mail addresses. This was straightforward. However, the new Thunderbird sometimes chokes when I try to save a message in a folder that is within another folder (I have a multi-level collection of e-mail folders. A work-around I found is to exit Thunderbird and restart it, at which point the second level folders are sometimes accessible. However, this is not a satisfactory long-term solution.

I have another Ubuntu 24.04 system which is a clean install, including Thunderbird as a snap. It works perfectly. Hence this seems like an issue with the update in place to Ubuntu 24.04, possibly with the old deb verion of Thunderbird not being completely uninstalled. I tried:

sudo apt remove thunderbird    
sudo snap remove thunderbird --purge
sudo snap install thunderbird

hoping to remove all traces of the old Thunderbird and cleanly reinstall it. This did not work. Next step was to romove $HOME/.thunderbird. That seems to have helped, but more testing is needed.

I also discovered that the upgrade had removed the Evince Document Viewer. This was easily fixed, but I have to wonder what other surprises are out there.

Ubuntu disables access to non-Ubuntu software sources during an upgrade, and this has to be fixed manually. You need to do this carefully.

For practical purposes this upgrade may be a failure. Fortunately, no data was lost. I may replace this system as my daily driver with the new (for me) Dell Inspiron 3670 and treat this HP system a primarily a file server. I was warned: OS upgrades in place are chancy. It is better to make a clean install. This was the policy at my last employer.