With the latest release of the Ubuntu 20.04 Beta, I thought I'd give it a shot. I've been using the early access releases of the Focal Fossa, but I'd installed it as a distribution upgrade over the earlier 19.10 release. The system was getting a little klunky, and my Chrome browser started barfing when I opened just about any website. So I thought I'd go brute force and reinstall this from scratch.

I always have my /home folder on a separate partition for this reason. On this system's case, I also have a large drive used for back-ups mounted as /archive. Everything else mounted into a generous root partition.

That's the start of some of my woes.

I started by checking some of the key places looking for updates, changes, add-ons, and whatnot that I might have done. I use a Slack webhook, for example, to alert when someone logs on or off of one my systems, or when they start or shutdown. I also have fail2ban for intrusion protection. And a few more things for every day use. I made some notes, and copied some configuration files. With my /home directory safe, I set out to start fresh on my root folder.

The installation was a breeze, as it has been for a decade. All of my hardware works, sound comes out, and my multiple monitors fired right up without hesitation. I added back some little things, and I think I'm mostly back.

It took just a few minutes to add curl and git and ack, three of my must-haves that aren't installed by default. I use the sdkman SDK manager app, and that puts everything in your /home folder, so that worked out of the box, as did the Groovy, Java, Gradle and other SDKs I use. I also use zsh for my shell, with the oh_my_zsh add-ons. That took a little bit extra to restore as the change of my shell to zsh didn't seem to be enough, and re-running the oh_my_zsh install script required me to move my .oh_my_zsh folder, and I couldn't find any custom settings within; I'd apparently put them in my .zshrc or .zsh_profile, which were now gone for some reason. With git, I like to use the git-smart add-ons, but I couldn't get gem to install; I don't know what it installed when I asked for gem...so I removed it for now. I did add Slack, but haven't added the Chrome Browser or any other software not in my /home folder.

The system seems to be running fine. I've got the sensation it's more responsive, until I load something really fat like IntelliJ IDEA. That could surely be on my old, old SATA HDD, because the system monitor is largely idle on all six of the processor cores, even while opening IDEA (but not while it builds).

Tomorrow starts a full day of work. We'll see if there's anything awry then. So far, so good, and the only woes were mine to begin with.