Trying to foresee issues before upgrading my laptop to 26.04

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Ubuntu Support Template

Ubuntu Version:
24.04.3 ----> 26.04

Desktop Environment (if applicable):
KDE Plasma is my preference.

Problem Description:
Some of you may remember my EXTENSIVE postings here in the first half of 2025. See Lenovo Thinkpad P16 Gen2 laptop won't accept 24.04 The root issue with all of them was that my then-new Lenovo Thinkpad P16 Gen2 laptop with an NVidia RTX 3500 GPU could not be upgraded to 24.04. This ultimately turned out to be because Lenovo had not released 24.04-compatible packages for their proprietary hardware. 4-5 months later, they did release such packages and it was clear sailing for me afterward.

Now, though, 26.04 has been released as LTE for both Ubuntu and Kubuntu. The latter is my preference. It is currently installed as a ‘desktop’ on top of Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS. Though some here urged me not to go that route, I did so anyway and experienced no trouble over the past eight months or so. For the upgrade to 26.04 my plan is to do a backup and flash a fresh image of Kubuntu 26.04, then restore from my backup and not worry about all the incompatibilities that I expect to find.

HOWEVER …
I can’t help but wonder if once again, Lenovo will be behind the curve on releasing the necessary proprietary driver packages for my hardware. Just because they have released 24.04 driver packages eventually does not mean that those packages will still work in 26.04. That release occurred around June 2025 ,15 months or so after the 24.04 release. I don’t want to jump down that rabbit hole before I am able to do so successfully.

So here’s the question: how can I tell if the proprietary driver packages exist for 26.04 before I jump off the cliff, if I can determine this at all?

The two packages that stopped me last year were jiyai and sutton.

Can anyone answer my question?

What I’ve Tried:
I’ve tried nothing yet. I’m trying to anticipate problems in advance.

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I suppose you could boot up the installer and try it without installing. It may give you an idea of what will work or not.

5 Likes
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I do not see how we can answer that question for you. Try Lenovo? You are a customer of theirs after all.

Dual boot between 24.04 LTS and 26.04 LTS. and try installing those two drivers in 26.04. Don’t forget you will need to copy the gpg key from 24.04 to 26.04. You might find in to /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/

You might also find that the Linux kernel in 26.04 does not compile with those drivers present. Remove the drivers.

You might also find something strange happening. You load into 24.04 and the drivers do their stuff. You re-start and boot into 26.04 and the drivers are still doing their stuff.

It is strange. I can boot into 20.04 that was pre-installed on this OEM laptop. And I have all the functions of the OEM keyboard driver. If I re-start into 24.04 I do not lose the extra keyboard functions.

Yet when I tried to install those drivers in 24.04 the kernel would not compile.

Regards

1 Like
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Thank you!

You say that you cannot provide me with a solution, and yet you have!

Given Lenovo’s track record of being late with updates to the proprietary drivers they provide (and being a customer of theirs and eight bucks will buy me a latte at Starbucks), the best solution to this dilemma is to install 26.04 as a dual boot (small in size) and use it only to determine every few months if it can be successfully updated, and only then start really using it.

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