Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

 I had already tried to upgrade from 23.10 to 24.04 about a month ago and ran into several issues (which I promptly forgot about once I reverted to 23.10, so don't ask).  Today I took the plunge and upgraded again.  I figured Ubuntu has had a month to iron out some minor issues.

So the install was relatively quick (I have a pretty good internet connection) and after the install and reboot Ubuntu came up fine.  It DID however break my wine setup, so I had to install a few components to fix it (there will probably be other issues)... it did not honor my dpkg architecture settings which indicates amd64 and i386.  I had to tweak it after the fact, but... after installing a couple extra things I was able to use wine to fire up a non-steam, Windows game.   And in fact I think there must have been some more AMD driver improvements because I swear the game actually ran smoother than on 23.10.

On steam, I fired up the frequently fickle World of Warships and it ran great.

I think it is (at least so far) safe to say the upgrade was successful.  I don't record much, I will have to install OBS and see how that works, and while I am sure it is just fine, I need to fire up some of my development applications.

A difference of one month, in this case, was pretty significant.  I am now rocking a safe, long-term version of Ubuntu.  Oh, and it is running gnome 46 as well, a minor upgrade from 23.10 which ran something like 45.x...

Ubuntu 23.10 and AMD RX 7800 XT and Wayland

I have been avoiding Wayland like the plague, mostly because my previous graphic card was an Nvidia 2060 SUPER...  and I read nightmare stories regarding Nvidia and Wayland.

It was time to upgrade my system (see previous entry) so I purchased an AMD 7800 XT with 16 GB of VRAM.  I was worried about this purchase as well because of the crazy forum back and forth attacks between fanbois ... and NVidia users tend to outnumber AMD users.  I decided to ignore those forums and picked up (based on actual testing by several different groups) the AMD card.  One bonus to that is that Linux tend to work more closely with AMD in regards to drivers (kernel supported).

I expected Ubuntu to self-implode when I swapped out the cards (again, because that's what SO MANY people said on the forums) but...  I installed the card, rebooted, and BOOM.  Came right up.  AND it came up automatically running Wayland.  I then fired up several non-steam games and several steam games and everything worked perfectly.

I have NOT attempted to install the 24.04 LTS yet, I will wait I think until the first point release or so, if I do it at all.  Right now 23.10 has been very very good to me.  No issues.

Anyway, just wanted to update about my old PC running Ubuntu, and with my new GPU.

For your pleasure:

Graphics card upgrade

 I picked up a very nice AMD RX 7800 XT graphics card with 16 GB vram.

Now, I run Ubuntu 23.10 and when I replaced the card, I assumed I would have to reinstall because of all the posts I read online that basically said a lot of bad stuff about the AMD card.

But, put it in, rebooted, Ubuntu came up like normal, except logging into gnome I found I was running Wayland and, to be honest, so far I have found it to be smoother and pretty nice in general.  When I opened Steam back up, it automatically installed some updates, I fired up a couple of games and they worked fine.

So, I am guessing I will stick with wayland and my AMD graphic card for now to see how it goes.