Kubuntu 24.04 third review - It's shaping up nicely

Updated: January 29, 2025

My first encounter with Kubuntu 24.04 was not very successful. Retro, but not in a good way. Since then, I've persevered with the distro, testing it every few months, usually after a nice, big round of updates. Overall, there's a solid, positive trend. It's getting better. Sure, one could argue that an LTS should be top-notch quality from the start, and that it needs to distinguish itself from the lesser short-support versions by being simply better, not worse, but hey. We can't go back in time.

Forward, we can. And so I'd like to give this distro its third round of testing. Well, fourth, to be fair, but who's counting. My scapegoat machine is a 2014 vintage IdeaPad Y50-70. 'Twas a fairly beefy and capable machine back in the day, still is, and with some modern technology under the hood (hint: SSD), it purrs nicely. The only question is, can its operating system match the hardware enthusiasm? Begin, we must.

Teaser

Update problems

The testing session did not go smoothly, I must say. As the first order of the day, I decided to patch the machine. I mean, there must be updates since the last time I used it, no. Well, as soon as I started Discover, it warned me that a certificate wasn't valid. But check this out, a certificate for odrs.gnome.org. What? Why do I have this on me KDE box?

Certificate error

Then, I tried to run updates from the command line, and got this:

E: Release file for http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/noble-security/InRelease is not valid yet (invalid for another 40d 12h 15min 46s). Updates for this repository will not be applied.

What? Well, I tried again, and then, things sort of worked. The system clock was fine, so I'm not sure what went wrong and where. Also, when I tried to install updates through Discover, the prompt for the password never showed up. I think this is some PolicyKit thingie bug or some thing. Instead, I had two notifications about Discover doing 1 item (yes, twice), but never quite finishing them. Well, later on, a good 10-15 minutes later, after I have already completed my system updates in Konsole, the prompt finally showed up, in the middle of a browsing session. Not very reassuring. In fact, horrendous from the quality perspective.

Discover not doing much

And then, two reboot icon notifications - an old bug I reported in my previous 24.04 reviews. This almost feels like an 'Allo 'Allo sketch, where Michelle from the Resistance says: listen very carefully, I shall say this only once. But twice. Yeah.

Restart, two icons

Now, during the updates, I got Nvidia drivers, too. Plus, the network got disconnected, twice. The second time around, I couldn't connect to the network I've been using. I had to choose a different access point, and then, I was able to go back to the first choice. Weird. Weird and bad, because in 2025, I'm fighting critical update problems and bugs like it's 2003.

Updates, Konsole

Was it worth it?

Truth to be told, yes! After this update, plus a reboot, everything was so much better. One, the boot sequence is ever so slightly shorter by 1-2 seconds, believe it. Two, the desktop is more responsive, which is always nice, when it happens. Three, the system was stable, there were no fresh errors or bugs. Four, the old issue with the background selection for SDDM, it seems to have been somewhat resolved. By this, I mean, rather than waiting a minute or two for things to happen, if they happen, now they do happen, and it only takes a few short seconds, so, progress, I guess.

Updated

Reasonable productivity

Overall, I had a moderate amount of joy and fun using the system. Now that it's snappier, faster, you sort of forget the fact this is a 10-year-old machine. But it does all sorts of modern wonders just fine. Sure, don't forget, I replaced the original HDD with SSD, which makes a fair deal of speed difference. It goes to show that arbitrary restrictions on hardware for some other other operating systems are just that. Arbitrary.

My box was purring nicely. Upscayl, DaVinci Resolve. I could play music and video, 4K screen and all that, decent sound quality, you get the latest Firefox and LibreOffice, too. Not bad. The laptop's battery is sort of busted, and it never offered any record times, ever, not with any operating system installed on it. But that's not something we can blame Kubuntu for, nor should we. Far from it. The experience was smooth and pleasant.

Apps

Battery

Conclusion

This is not going to be any sort of revolutionary article. After all, my 2010 eeePC netbook, with an Atom processor and just one GB of RAM still works, still runs fine with MX Linux on it. There's absolutely no reason why a laptop from 2014, with an i7 processor, 16 GB or RAM and a discrete graphics card, and with SSD to boot, shouldn't work well. And indeed it does. Now, finally, though, the software matches the hardware, in the sense that Kubuntu 24.04 has matured enough to be viable for everyday use. Shame that it took so long, superb that it did.

My third review of the distro is more positive than the initial results. A lot of the problems have been resolved, and I'm quite pleased with the responsiveness and stability improvements. Then again, the first few minutes of the testing sessions were quite rough. I complained about software managed quite some in my Tumbleweed review a couple of weeks back, and I wasn't happy to see Discover throw out yet more errors. But these were transient, they went away, and the system successfully patched itself, bringing many a benefit to the end user. Well, time to wrap this up. I'm kind of content, so let's not jinx it. See you around.

Cheers.