Upgrade Ubuntu or not (strictly from the sound quality perspective)?

[agent_kith]

Since the Ubuntu 16.04 is EOL and not supported any more, I was thinking of upgrading it.

For me, the sound quality is the most important aspect of using Snakeoil in the first place, so I'm postponing the update to the latest Ubuntu version since there is no custom realtime kernel for it yet.

Because of this, the upgrade to 18.04 seems like the obvious choice, but I'm concerned about the sound quality after reading this two years old post from @agent_kith :

Personally others, and myself personally don't like 18.04. I have no idea why that is so, perhaps the kernels we tried, or the OS ifself doesn't "gel" well with the rest of the system. 20.04 seems like a better OS, but there's always a chance a RT kernel will ruin it.

Guess at the end of the day, we havn't worked out how the underlying OS influences the sound.

https://www.liquidweb.com/kb/how-to-upgr...ntu-18-04/

What to do, what to do!?!?

SSH into the computer, and run

Code:

sudo do-release-upgrade

When prompted to install, say 'Y', when prompted to replace configuration files, say 'N'. And then when prompted to reboot, do so. And that should upgrade you to 18.04.

For experimentation, it's best to have a second (or more) SSD that you can swap in/out of. This way you'll always have a "reference" to compare any new changes. I would suggest if possible get at least a second SSD. Or at the very least, do a disk backup of your existing config before you upgrade your Ubuntu, that way you always have a fallback in case the upgrade don't work. Once you find something better, that then becomes your reference, and you make changes to the other SSD until you find improvements again.