If I drew a flowchart to answer, the first question would be something like
Do all of the following apply? If so, proceed according to your experience. If not, be sure to be on the latest LTS, so long as it is at least a month old.
- I am an experienced sysadmin
- I have a recent backup in a safe place and I am very confident I can restore it
- I know how to perform a command line upgrade
- I know how to find and quote the relevant parts of the log when reporting a problem here on meta.
Check your current OS version by reading /etc/lsb-release
root# cat /etc/lsb-release
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=22.04
DISTRIB_CODENAME=jammy
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS"
It should be recently updated, should be an LTS, should not be much more than 2 years old. The first two digits are the year number. But don’t trust an LTS that is less than a month old.