OK, in live boot now. Want to test graphics card. In the live boot, the driver isn’t installed. Is this possible on live boot or do I have to install to get that?
Driver install failed on Live Boot with both Software and Updates additional driver and Using the NVIDIA driver installer. So apparently no testing that in live boot. So there is apparently nothing but to install. I have the 22.04 recovery disk I made at the beginning if all does not go well.
Into the abyss!
Good news on install of 24.04.
So - good to go! Before I dive in to installing everything I want, going to give kubuntu 24.04.1 a try. I am assuming this will work - just want to see which I like better!
Thanks to all for your patience with me.
Thinking over my frantic weekend dealing with this, I think the root of my confusion and fear was that I didn’t understand why OEM packages existed. They seem to be temporary hacks created when a new piece of hardware is released, so that the new hardware can run on Linux. Then someone gets to work building support into the kernel so the OEMs aren’t needed anymore. Folks were telling me to just test this and see if the next version supports the new hardware, I thought I had to find upgrade packages for the OEM stuff and was pissed that Ubuntu wasn’t upgrading them. I didn’t know they weren’t needed anymore.
I suspect that this is really a problem with the do-release-upgrade process. It lacks the information that the OEM package the previous version required is no longer necessary. Couldn’t this be improved somehow?
Glad you worked it all out.
Use ubuntu-bug ubuntu-release-upgrader-core and let the developers know about it, then it can be fixed 
Or maybe not.
I’ve got some other issues going on. Dual monitors work on boot up but not when plugged in after boot, and after a long pause, the connection to the second monitor is lost. See https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/790268/second-monitor-does-not-reconnect-after-disconnecting
Besides that I had another perhaps hardware-related occurrence: I had an instance of Dolphin running (yes, I went ahead with Kubuntu) with an sftp connection to my old computer. It was working fine, but at some point after a lengthy delay with the computer asleep, the connection was dead, and short of rebooting, nothing would get it back. These all point perhaps to hardware glitches.
Another issue: Restart the machine gets stuck. I waited five minutes with this display, seemingly dead. Here is a screenshot.
The only ways around it seem to be physically stopping the machine or the Alt-PrtSc-REISUO keystroke sequence.
And now Kubuntu’s Discover app, the equivalent of Gnome Software and Updates won’t launch. Boys, unless someone can offer a solution, I’m heading back to 22.04 LTS soon.
That’s a known bug that we haven’t found a solution to. There is a workaround:
sudo apt remove plasma-discover-backend-snap
And if you want to have a browsable snap store with a graphical way to work with snaps:
sudo snap install snap-store
Long-story short, it’s a race condition between the backends of plasma-discover and is far from an easy bugfix as it’s hard to diagnose and extremely inconsistent. Some people experience it, some don’t.
Thanks, but I have gone back to the factory-installed Ubuntu 22.04. Too many issues, see above. I bought this computer for a purpose and that purpose was not to help Ubuntu and Lenovo to get their act together. Thanks for all who tried to help me,
Wishing you the best. In the future, try to give people a chance to help you. I answered you only 30 minutes after your post, that’s not enough time to help you.
@eeickmeyer Thanks for your help on the Discover issue. However, please see all the other issues I reported today, prior to that one. All seem likely to be hardware related, and it all got to be just too much.
I do appreciate your quick reply on the Discover issue. But my time to debug hardware issues is finite.
The crash you saw was in nouveau, which is the open source nvidia driver, and something I would absolutely expect. You didn’t have the binary nvidia driver active. This was not a hardware problem, not a Lenovo problem, not an Ubuntu problem. It was simply that the driver wasn’t installed and enabled correctly yet.
I concur with @eeickmeyer - while it’s frustrating for you to have a system that isn’t working, it’s also frustrating for me to see an issue that could very easily be solved without a ‘nuke and pave’. 
@popey - Alan, while I appreciate the effort that you’ve put in trying to help me, it all is simply too much. Of course, most people wouldn’t get into the weeds as much as I already have. They would think I must be mad to have spent the time I already have. Ask my wife! I have other things I must do. I simply don’t have weeks to play with this, never knowing if I’ve reached the last stumbling block. As I said above I had reasons for buying this expensive computer that do not involve helping Ubuntu and Lenovo solve this release. I never got to experience stability. There may be people who love living on the bleeding edge. I’m probably in the 95th percentile on that myself. But my limit has been reached.
You say “the” crash. I presume you’re talking about the issue I reported by a screen shot. There are apparently open source and Nvidia drivers. I installed the proprietary nvidia driver. Why was nouveau in the picture?
But there were other issues I reported above.
One was the dual monitor issue. I can probably presume that that too is a result of nouveau. It’s working fine back in 22.04.
Then there is kubuntu discover issue for which there is apparently no solution known according to @eeickmeyer. Okay, I didn’t have to go with kubuntu. That one is on me.
Then there is the issue of the lost sftp connection which could not be remade short of rebooting. No idea where to turn on that.
Again thanks, and I hope my travails are being seen by the engineers who get paid to fix these issues.
It may have ben installed, but certainly wasn’t active. It’s not tremendously useful to speculate as the system has been wiped. We could have trivially fixed that one.
24.04 is far from the bleeding edge. It’s just that you had a couple of unfortunate issues. Some of which may well have been caused by the incorrect driver being in use. We may never know.
Have fun with your functioning laptop! 
Got it working!
Hooray!
Here’s how:
Call back Lenovo tech support. Bully my way through two or three phone calls until finding the support rep who tried to reach me a couple of days ago without a callback number, leaving only an email from “Ahmed”. After much persistence got a return call from Ahmed.
He guided me through the following steps, some of which I hadn’t known about.
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install update-manager-core <-- didn't do initially
reboot
sudo apt dist-upgrade <-- didn't do initially
This brought me up to 22.04.5 LTS
tried
sudo do-release-upgrade
This failed as before.
Edited /etc/upgrade-manager/release_upgrades changing never to normal. Then
sudo do-release-upgrade again
This time success.
So Three cheers for Ahmed.
One and a half cheers for Lenovo. Points off for
And three cheers for Discourse for giving it their best shot!
As to the graphics card, are these the settings I want going forward?
Best to use Ubuntu’s nVidia drivers. They are the same as nVidia’s but made to work with Ubuntu. If you installed the .run version from nVidia, you may have to reinstall with every kernel update where Ubuntu’s version does that automatically.
You also have to purge any previous nVidia drivers before installing a new one. You get conflicts and then more issues. If you have the .run installer, use its procedure to remove it.
If you manually installed a nVidia driver, but now recommended is different you need to purge all nVidia & then install the suggested/recommended driver.
Possible type0
Mine is here: ‘/etc/update-manager/release-upgrades’
Yes, it is a typo. Mine is the same as yours.
Glad to see you got it running.
Do you know what Nvidia driver you are running? Your RTX 3500 is a cut down RTX4070TI, so would benefit from the latest Nvidia driver available. The standard repos only list up to Nvidia 550, but if you enable the graphics-drivers PPA, they offer 560 and 565, which I have been using on my 3080, and which definitely improved Wayland 2 monitor support. xorg on two monitors works fine, but there are bugs (launchpad 2042301) in the Gnome Desktop under xorg which cause some initial delays for window display (or even move/resize) – workarounds in the bug report.
To reiterate the benefits of using the Nvidia drivers supplied in the standard (or graphica-drivers) repos – the Nvidia driver must be rebuilt for each kernel update, and the Ubuntu drivers come with the necessary scripts to make this happen. Drivers from other sources may or may not have an equivalent set of working scripts. If the scripts don’t work, the new Nvidia driver doesn’t get built, and next boot with the new kernel lacks a video driver (black screen oops).
