The BeatLeader experience:
Holy shit I got 6th in the world on this map on hard!! I only missed a few blocks, I bet I could do better next time!
Also BeatLeader:
I finally FC'ed this E+ map, I'm the best!! ... Position 1657
I've seen lots of really positive upgrade posts so far, and I'm not sure I have much to add here, other than I have 10 machines running 24.04 or 22.04, doing wildly different things, configured very differently, and the tldr: I'm up to 8/10 machines completed and it's been very minor issues. I'm a really old school Linux user from the Yggdrasil/SLS/Slackware days, and I still treat machines like pets not livestock, so here's all the pets in the order it was done:
12th Gen i3 Dell Inspiron Laptop - This is the only one I did a fresh install on. I figured the do-release-upgrade -d would be broken on day 1, so I just did some manual tar backups and scp'ed them to another machine then nukey to the ground. Restoring FF profile, discord, steam all pretty smooth. Restoring Syncthing broke pretty badly, still need to fix it. Everything after this one was do-release-upgrade -d.
N100 Mini PC weather station - This is a mini PC running on my desk with a portable monitor, and it has a custom made weather dashboard that's a mix of open weather and my ESP8266/BME280 IoT network. Also runs my custom Minecraft modpack server. Not heavily customized, spends most of it's time just refreshing the weather dashboard. Upgrade went smooth, zero issues, other than needing to update 24.04 once manually first.
N100 Mini PC desktop. This is a desktop in the basement, and runs nothing of value other than FF/Discord. It's there for when I'm running a webinar and I can check up on the chatter. This one kinda had an issue. When it rebooted it loaded into a black screen. I'm not sure if it tried to go into sleep mode or screen blank and just wouldn't wake up, but a reboot fixed it and zero issues since. Total mystery.
Intel 7th gen IBM ThinkPad - This old workhorse is for when I work in the garage on motorcycles. It's dirty. Screen has some scratches. I just look stuff up with it or play videos. I run it with mitigations=off in the grub config because I want maximum speed. Other than the upgrade taking longer than the N100's, the desktop experience does feel faster than 24.04. Actually that's pretty common for all the upgrades. The upgrade did not disable my totally unsafe mitigations setting. Thank you Ubuntu for respecting my stupidity.
Ryzen 6800H /w 3070ti Lenovo Legion 15 - Gaming laptop and the only machine with a mixed AMD APU/nvidia GPU. This machine gave me the most grief, but only because it had a custom nvidia CUDA stack in there. I installed from nvidia's repos instead of through ubuntu's own repos originally. Thankfully do-release-upgrade warns you about the jank and tells you to remove it first. I stripped everything nvidia off the machine first, just to be safe. It runs off the APU just fine. Once it was up and running again "ubuntu-drivers install" put nvidia 595.x on there and I apt installed cuda-toolkit-13-1, and we're good to go. Battery life seems a bit better on this one now.
Ryzen 3700X/RTX3070 TV/Console PC - This machine was on 25.10, and the first attempt at an nvidia only machine (other were intel/amd apu) getting upgraded. 25.10 is kinda cheating, it's already running Wayland, so it was low risk. I ran into the snap Steam menu clicking issue on the gaming laptop, so before the upgrade on this one I swapped to .deb steam. No real issues here either. All the xbox controllers stayed paired and games didn't really change. Steam VR remained a total piece of crap but WiVRn is rock solid.
Ryzen 5700/ dual RTX5060ti 16 gig AI Server - Ok this is where things get higher risk. The dual gpu server is used for all my local LLM and whisper use, which is critical for work. This one used a non jank 580 driver/CUDA 13 ubuntu packages. This one runs llama.cpp with a custom model loader and whisper.cpp, both git cloned and recompiled pretty regularly to test newer models. Anxiety was really misplaced here, upgrade went smooth as ice and a ubuntu-drivers install after the reboot got me 595. Model loader was python based and used normal ubuntu python3-blah packages so it worked fine. As a long time python developer I usually hate the distro packages, but this was smooth. Thank you package maintainers!
12700k/3060ti Desktop - This is the dual 27" 1440p high refresh battle station. I've done more stupid hacks and manual modifications than I could possibly remember on this thing. Another manual nvidia/cuda stack, Chome configured for usb hotplug for managing Meta Quest hardware, multiple video editing tools, minecraft modpack development stuff, random text embedding, image and music generation models, each needing dozens of packages to run properly. I held this one back until this weekend, just to make sure some early massive bug wasn't found in 26.04. The worst that happened here is moving from x11 to wayland reset my monitor setup, so they were in the wrong position and reset back to 60hz. It did break some custom python stuff that you run with --break-system-packages, but I know that's my fault and I know how to fix it (by breaking more system packages!). This one took a while - There's a LOT of packages that needed upgrading. So far so good, nothing broken.
Ryzen 5800H mini PC media server - This is still running 22.04 right now and the thought of upgrading is still scary, so it's held back for now. It runs a Jellyfin/Sonarr/Radarr stack (some deb, some docker, some just yeeted into the home dir) along with a dozen demos I use for work, which are all fully custom polluted python packages. Some stuff is custom in a way that I'm not even sure I could rebuild it properly. Also my complex nginx/certbot ingress setup is on here. And the entire IoT stack is coordinated with this thing. I'm in deep shit here, there's no way this doesn't end in tears. My k8s/docker buddies mock me daily over the existence of this thing. Pray for me.
N100 quad ethernet AI Router - This one takes a bit to explain. It's a stock standard Ubuntu 24.04 on mini PC that acts like a network router. Totally normal stuff, I'm sure a bunch of you have something like this. Instead of pf or opnSense, it runs stock standard nftables, dnsmask and wireguard. However... my buddy Claude configured the entire thing originally, and now it's fully managed/modified by my local models. They've gotten that good. It's got a routed IPv6 and natted IPv4, adguard dns and some custom monitoring tooling and backup/restore scripts with unattended upgrades enabled. This machine is also held back, because finding a time to run the release upgrade is tricky. I might just hold it back for the 26.04.1 release.
And that's it, thanks for reading my novel! I've had some really ugly breakage in the past moving from one LTS to another, but 26.04 seems to be the least drama version so far. If you're on the fence about upgrading, well... it works on my machine(s)!