Make a test plan

There is an old saying “We don’t plan to fail, we fail to plan”. On that premise make yourself a test plan:

• Create a 18.04 Live USB with persistent storage.
• Boot from the USB and select “Try before Installing”.
• Install your mission critical applications to the USB’s persistent storage.
• Test your applications with a COPY of your data.
• Do not test the programs on the real live data on sdX.
• Try out your USB keyboards and mice.
• Try out your printer(s).
• Access your favorite websites and download files.
• Test suspend and resume.
• Test Fn keys for volume and brightness.
• Make a keyboard shortcut and ensure it works ok.
• Test systemd, cron and other system utilities.
• If you’ve written scripts, copy them over and test them.
• Test xrandr functions you have used before.
• Run CPU & RAM stress tests. System benchmarks might be helpful too.
• Remember 18.04 uses Unity 7.5 but 16.04 uses Unity 7.4 I think.
• Of course you should test Anything else you can think of

This test plan might be overly cautious in some areas so you might scale it back depending on your comfort level and time constraints.

Clone your data on disk instead of USB

If you have enough disk space to hold a copy of your Ubuntu partition, or an external drive or USB Pen Drive that can hold it, use this script: Bash script to clone Ubuntu to new partition for testing 18.04 LTS upgrade Then you can clone your data without rebooting.

The advantage is you avoid the time consuming and laborious task of rebooting to a Live Boot USB. The speed of conversion is also many times faster on an internal drive.

Summary

For myself I made an Ubuntu 18.04 Live-USB with Persistent Storage a couple months ago and was surprised how stable it was.

Since then there has be a raft of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS automatic updates with bugs so I’ve stopped updating Ubuntu since January 1, 2018. I enjoy the stability of 16.04 before year 2018 so I’ll just keep using it as is. After 30 days of no bug reports of LTS updates I’ll update 16.04. I will hold off converting 16.04 LTS to 18.04 LTS when it initially comes out in April 2018. Again I’ll pay close attention to bug reports and pull the trigger on upgrading when instinct tells me the time is right.