We are continuing the work to rebase KDE neon on bionic and are now looking for people to test the upgrader.

KDE neon Bionic Upgrade instructions and report form

Our upgrader has been working for some time and many people have used it successfully, but as ever we wanted to prove it was correct and QA. It uses the same upgrader as Ubuntu which was written over a decade ago and has seen not much attention since. We wrote our own notifier and got translations for it. Added to the upgrader is stopping Packagekit so you don’t get notified of updates while you are already updating. We added translations to the upgrader. A test was added to make sure version numbers in bionic are greater than in xenial which turns out not to be the case for a few things so we had to add rules to deal with them and then make sure those rules got used by the upgrader. The release notes that get shown before an upgrade strangely have no translations but we edited them a bit so in English it is relevanto to neon. Stopping the screen locker during an upgrade is important too but surpringly faffy since the upgrader runs as root and the screen locker as user.

It’s ready for pre-release testing now, so let us know how it goes on the wiki or in the forums etc.

The KDE neon on Ubuntu 18.04 “bionic” ISOs are also still available as a preview for testing.