Upgrade from Ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04

Ubuntu 18.04, with code name Bionic Beaver released on 26th April 2018. It is an LTS version which means that has Long Term Support from Canonical. The end of life date for the 18.04 version is April 2023.

You can read more info about Ubuntu releases here https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases

Why I decided to upgrade to 18.04?

GNOME 3.28 

This is the most important change you will see in this LTS version. Unity is no longer the default GUI for Ubuntu, and a customized version of Gnome is the replacement. Gnome has great features, and if you were not a big fan of Unity, now you can have your Ubuntu with Gnome 3.28.1 out of the box!

How you can have it?

Generally you can run an upgrade with the following command:

sudo do-release-upgrade 

but if you try to execute this command right now (10-05-2018), you will get the following message:

 No new release found

This happens because Canonical gives the opportunity to the users to upgrade their system directly, a couple of months later than the release date. It is expected to be available in the middle of the summer (late July 2018).

So if you don't want to wait (which is now the recommended approach) you can run a force upgrade using:

sudo do-release-upgrade -d 

It will ask you two times to accept the upgrade (one for downloading and installing the new packages, and one for removing things that are not needed anymore).

It will not take more than 1 hour if you have a stable fast internet connection.

In the next article I will write my experience so far with Ubuntu 18.04 and Gnome 3.28.1 !