Upgrading to Ubuntu 24.04 on my Lenovo Legion 5

I had been using Ubuntu 22.04 LTS for around 1.5 years. Overall, I like and prefer Ubuntu, and it works quite well on my Legion 5 laptop. Even gaming on Ubuntu is good since the Nvidia graphics driver comes preinstalled.

One minor issue was with the older GTK version. Because of this, the Dropbox desktop app would not run properly: when you install the .deb package and then try to upgrade your system packages, it will fail and tell you to apply fixes which will uninstall Dropbox. So every time you want to upgrade your system packages, you have to uninstall Dropbox and then install it again.

🔗Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS was launched last year, but at the time I didn’t want to upgrade. However, after a year I thought it would be a good time since the major bugs would be fixed by now.

Major reasons for upgrading:

• New Linux kernel
• No GTK version issue with Dropbox
• Some UI (GNOME) improvements
• Needed to format the disk to allot a bigger partition size for Ubuntu

🔗Installation Experience

The whole installation process was easy. I created a bootable USB drive using balenaEtcher. Then I disabled secure boot and enabled boot from USB in the BIOS. On Lenovo, like most systems, you press F2 while booting to access the BIOS.

I’m dual booting with Windows 11, which I use mostly for gaming (Marvel Rivals). I have two SSDs installed: 512 GB and 1 TB. The 512 GB one is all for Windows, and the 1 TB one I’ve partitioned into 500 GB for Ubuntu, 32 GB for swap memory, and the remaining storage is formatted as an NTFS drive so that both Windows and Ubuntu can access it.

🔗Installing Apps

• Konsole: The default Terminal is okay, but I was bored with it so I decided to give Konsole a try, and I really liked its simplicity and accessibility. Just make sure not to install it from the Snap store, as snap apps are sandboxed and most things will not work. I installed it from Flathub.
• VS Code: Installed directly from its website
• Cursor: Cursor only provides an AppImage, which is a portable app, so you don’t install it; it just runs in a sandbox and has no root access.
• Zed: I gave Zed a try and there are some annoying bugs, like when the system wakes from sleep the Zed window doesn’t render and it shows some other window’s content on top of it, and the only way to fix it is to kill Zed and restart. Sometimes extensions won’t install, occasionally the editor shows a pointer cursor for no reason, there’s no Prettier extension, etc.

🔗Alt + Tab Scroll Glitch

Alt + Tab is a very old issue that affects X11 systems and has remained unresolved by the Chromium team all this time. The problem is that when you are using the Chrome browser and some Electron-based app (which packages Chromium) like VS Code, the scrolling you do in one window will also happen in the other when you switch apps and scroll. This jittery and unexpected scrolling is a pain for a lot of people. This problem has been discussed here: askubuntu and vscode issue
Solution: There is a workaround by Lucas Resck using a GNOME extension which works wonders.
This only happens on X11 and not on Wayland, but the Nvidia driver support on Wayland is not good, so that’s not an option.