Updated: November 6, 2024
Rough start. Very much so. A time travel back into the past, but not in a good way, if you will. I was not very happy the first time I tried Kubuntu 24.04. The distro felt extremely unpolished. Just a few weeks later, the distro had a major update, and along the way, a good few dozen bugs and issues went away. Rather quickly, Kubuntu became reasonably pleasant to use. You could say, just wait a few months. Or you could say, don't release the distro when it's not ready, just wait a few months. 24.07 or 24.09 sounds just as good as any other sequence of numbers, as long as the user experience is great. No one ever said, oh, I don't want to use that particular version, the numbers are all wrong.
All right, how are things now? Well, first, I need to tell I've not yet applied the dot release. On purpose. Second, I've been using the distro for a couple of months now, and I've got a few fresh things to share. Good things, I must say, in a similar vein to what we've seen in the previous review/report. It's only fair to share the positive side of things as much as the negative one(s) of any which system, especially when you're using it long-term and such. Let's commence then.
General impressions
So there is no confusion, I'm running Kubuntu 24.04 on an old machine. A 2014 laptop, to be exact. Why? Why not. There's no reason to toss away a perfectly capable i7-processor, 16GB-RAM system, plus an Nvidia graphics card and 4k screen to boot, just because it's had a few years under its belt. The modern hardware obsolescence approach is pointless. On top of that, I added an SSD into this box, which is how the whole story started.
Before the disk upgrade, the performance was meh. Namely, the boot sequence was EXTREMELY long. Three minutes or so. The SSD cuts that a lot. On the I/O front, I'm still not as happy as I could be. I'm 100% certain that the operating system is under-optimized. I'm 100% certain no one tests stuff on 10-year-old machines, especially with ancient, mechanical storage. Most developers run blazing-fast top-notch systems, and they are completely unaware on how old hardware works and behaves. It's a shame, because this is a direct contradiction of the Linux frugality story.
That said, the Plasma desktop is quite lean - very lean. Amazingly nimble and responsive. But underneath, things could be faster. If you're wondering how and why, take a look at my Asus eeePC revival from a few weeks ago. A lowly 2010 netbook with a mere 1GB RAM still works, still runs a Debian-based MX Linux just fine. There's no reason, if that system can boot in about two minutes, why a 2014 machine with pretty solid specs for its time, would ever take THREE minutes to reach the desktop session. And with SSD, those numbers are still not good.
And I must refer you to my 2012-era articles, like say the Ubuntu Pangolin boot time piece. Then, if you look even further back, the 2010-era articles, you will find the contemporary Xubuntu getting into a working desktop session in under 10 seconds, with init rather than systemd plus simple, mechanical storage. For that matter, my 2011-era desktop, retired since late 2019, used to take only about as long to get into the desktop, with Windows 7 and WD Black disks.
This is not strictly relevant to Kubuntu 24.04, but it shows how "flippant" and "grand" modern software development is. Storage is cheap and fast, let's use it wastefully. Memory is cheap, let's use it wastefully. A completely wrong approach, and it's true for everything. Browsers taking GBs of memory to display a single tab. Chat programs eating GBs of memory. Software that needs 100s of GB to install. And systems that will boot very fast if you have top-tier disks, or very, very slowly if you have anything else, because that's not cool or interesting.
Oh, well, anyway, let's get back to the distro ...
Kubuntu 24.04 works fine! The slightly updated version is faster, more responsive than my baseline test. In-vivo operating are relatively quick, unless you hit bugs. The boot sequence remains unacceptably slow. The system is quite stable, though. Suspend & resume works reliably, even with the NVIDIA card, or to be more precise, a hybrid-graphics PRIME configuration, with the discrete device used on demand. How efficient or transparent is this setup? Very, as I've mentioned in my Upscayl article and the previous 24.04 installment.
There's no excessive heating, no screaming of fans. The system is quite composed. Its battery remains the weakest link, having deteriorated to about 3/4th of its original capacity, plus it's never really been well suited for the machine's spec. You can maybe work 1-2 hours tops before it croaks.
Some small bugs still linger
Remember the double-reboot icon issue? It's back:
On the visual side, I'm running with Compositing off, which adds to the desktop responsiveness. There are some small problems here and there, mostly how certain elements are rendered, borders in particular. This is nothing special, but it's possible I'm seeing these more clearly because my desktop does not use any shadows, and everything is quite sharp and distinct.
Boot times, revisited
The system had some updates. I let them run. Reboot. The startup sequence is now about 17 seconds long. Shorter than it was when I started playing with Kubuntu 24.04 on this machine. This shows that there's always room for optimization and improvement. Slightly more responsive, slightly faster boot ... We're getting there. The only problem is, we should have started there.
Conclusion
Kubuntu 24.04 has improved massively since its release. This is a great thing. But in an ideal world, it would not have been released before being thoroughly tested and polished, like it is now. Technically speaking, the release dates are entirely arbitrarily. If everyone "waits" for the dot release anyway, then there's no value to GA, except for people to get themselves burned with early, unnecessary problems and bugs. It's like, let's sacrifice our biggest fans, they will come back regardless. This sort of approach seems quite common in the software world - a poor excuse for the laborious diligence of proper QA.
This distro could have been launched in July or September just as it was in April, except it would have been nice and slick and elegant by then. And it can still get better. Evidently, as my two post-install reviews clearly show. However, on its own, Kubuntu 24.04 has become a usable system. I cannot ignore what happened early on, my confidence levels ain't skyrocketing, but I'm pleased nonetheless. Well, there we go. Off to the next escapade.
Cheers.