Will the upgrade wait for 14.04 users really be until July?

The -d switch will not upgrade 14.04 or 15.10 to 16.04. It will upgrade to Yakkety Yak the development version of 16.10 which when it is released in October will only have 9 months support.

There are reasons why the LTS to LTS upgrade has been postponed until July. I can only guess at the reasons.

One of which could be the non existence of AMD proprietary video drivers in 16.04. AMD is not supporting its proprietary video drivers on 16.04 because 16.04 uses a version of the X server that AMD drivers do not work well with. AMD is putting a lot of work into its open source video drivers (radeon & amdgu). That work may have some good results by the summer.

Keep in mind that 14.04 still has 3 years support left. So, there is no real reason to rush to upgrade. In my opinion that only people who really need to install the very latest version of Ubuntu are those who have purchased the very latest hardware or have some hardware issue that they hope the latest version will resolve.

My advice to you is to download the latest 16.04 image and put in a dual install of 14.04 & 16.04 and see if the hardware issues are really resolved.

As for Chrome not updating that should be solvable. Is the problem related to Google no longer supporting 32 bit version of Chrome on Linux? We can edit a configuration file to fix that issue.

http://www.webupd8.org/2016/03/fix-failed-to-fetch-google-chrome_3.html

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2016/03/f...t-error-ubuntu

Regards