I have a computer running KDE neon 5.19 on the bionic base. I haven’t used it for a few years and went to use it and found most of the packages broken and out if date. I updated my repository lists to the jammy repositories and have approximately 15gb worth of packages to update now. I’m just wondering is it safe to upgrade the system this way? I’m not sure what else to do other than a full reinstall and i don’t really want to do that.
It should work in theory. But I would highly recommend creating a backup before attempting to update, as it’s unlikely this scenario has been well tested.
I have all my personal data on separate partitions and i’m not too concerned about losing data on the system side i’m just more worried about the system ending up in an unbootable state and creating a bunch more work for myself.
Don’t rush into this too quick. I don’t run Neon, but I don’t know how many versions you can update at one time. You may have to leap frog a couple of times to safely get current. I’m sure one of the devs will know.
The install was originally on xenial, I upgraded to bionic at some point in the past. It’s just one lts version I’d be skipping.
Skipping releases when upgrading is completely unsupported on Ubuntu, or KDE neon.
Since skipping releases doesn’t work on *buntu LTS, so it won’t be any different for KDE neon. It is much more than just adjusting sources, particularly on the Ubuntu parts, but also somewhat with the neon components.
While the KDE parts might be OK, the core Ubuntu OS will almost certainly fail to upgrade properly, which will probably break a lot of Plasma as well.
If you have your $HOME on another partition or drive, it should be easy to reinstall the current release, and preserve your data and settings. But even then, 8 major Plasma releases might involve some configuration options that have progressed in the past three and a half years. it might be smart to keep that in the back of your mind if there are some desktop oddities from that.
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This sounds like a pretty good reason to not waste my time trying. Though…now I kind of want to try it just to see what happens. After I get a current neon live disk ready.
I’ve been using the same home folder since I was running kubuntu 14.04 at least. Since before plasma 5. I remember switching over from plasma 4 to 5 at some point and having to reconfigure everything. It can’t be worse than that.
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Same here, if I were in the same situation. 
Oh, no, nothing like that at all, for sure.
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