There and Back Again: My 26.04 LTS Experience.
I've been using Ubuntu as my primary OS for roughly 9 months now ever since Microsoft announced that support for Windows 10 was officially over and my OS subsequently began to crash frequently.
I had planned on switching over to Linux for years, but the convenience of Windows kept me using Windows up until then. What finally got me to make the switch was how Windows 11 was so demanding and so full of superfluous A.I. powered bloatware that I couldn't just update my Windows 10 Rig to Windows 11 without purchasing a whole new MoBo, which I wasn't interested in doing, so I finally decided to jump ship back in July of last year.
Initially I ran into some trouble because I had accidentally installed 23.04 "Lunar Lobster" instead of 24.04 "Noble Numbat", and because 23.04 was no longer supported by then, I couldn't connect to any servers to update to 23.10 or 24.04, so I had to do a clean installation.
24.04 worked well for me until I upgraded my worn out AMD RX-6800 GPU with a new RX-9060XT, which 24.04 lacked the necessary up-to-date drivers, kernal, and mesa build to run. Despite numerous attempts to update those components to make 24.04 compatible with the 9060, I ultimately was forced to update to 25.04 before it would work.
25.04 through 25.10 worked without a hitch for me, so I didn't hesitate to update to 26.04 "Radiant Raccoon" as soon as the update was made available. Unfortunately, that's where everything fell apart...
Initially, 26.04 seemed great. 26.04 seems to be more compatible with my 9060XT than previous builds, yielding higher FPS on average and more vibrant visuals in-game. I did experience some intermittent microstutter, but it only ever lasted like 0.5 seconds, amounting to little more than a moderately jarring hitch.
However, suddenly after 3 days of relatively smooth sailing, 26.04 could no longer detect my Wireless Card, thus forcing me to use a Wireless USB Adapter to connect to Wi-Fi. Again, not a huge deal, a mild inconvenience at best. I tried many times to fix the issue, but to no avail.
Shortly after that, I began to experience unnaturally lengthy boot times, taking upwards of 2 minutes for Ubuntu 26.04 when it had previously only taken roughly 30 seconds. Likewise, launching games on Steam took upwards of 2 minutes when they had previously taken mere seconds to launch. Attempts to troubleshoot these issues were fruitless.
At this point I was officially fed up with it and decided to roll back to 25.10. Alas, even this did not go smoothly either as the long boot times continued to persist afterwards and Snaps ceased to function altogether.
After posting a thread on the subject, I was convinced by users to simply do a clean reinstallation of 26.04, which solved the issues with slow booting, but all other issues persisted. Nevertheless, I was perfectly willing to simply deal with the minor inconveniences of intermittent microstutter and having to use a Wireless USB Adapter to connect to Wi-Fi, until...
The following day a new issue manifested itself in the form of intermittent crashes after starting up games, followed by the PC persistently starting at the Boot Menu of my MoBo.
Since then I have reinstalled 25.10, all of the aforementioned issues have vanished, and thus I have decided to wait until a few weeks after the release of 26.04.1 to experiment any further with the latest version of Ubuntu. I've done my best to report all of the aforementioned bugs in hopes that they will be addressed with the release of 26.04.1, but for now I'm sticking with 25.10 because it has simply been more stable for me.
If this experience has taught me anything it's that its better to wait on bug fixes rather than updating to the latest unpolished build immediately and having to deal with all the little glitches. I'm typically willing to roll with the punches and help out with the development of new software by reporting bugs, but now that Linux is my primary OS, it's just too nerve racking for me.