Just updated my mother's PCs from Kubuntu 22.04 LTS to 24.04 LTS and then had to manually remove the unwanted apps they added and install Flatpak replacements for half of the not-yet-Flatpak'd apps they removed as part of the update process, then laboriously go through, re-setting all the file associations. This sort of nonsense is why I run LTS distros and put off major upgrades as long as possible. I just can't trust distro maintainers as much as I'd like. #kubuntu #ubuntu #linux
@Dustwin Not "can't trust" in the sense of "they'll attack me". "Can't trust" in the sense that "I have to budget time and effort around the assumption that a major version bump will reset an uncertain number of my user preferences to their defaults when all I wanted was to keep receiving security updates". As a UI/UX guy, I firmly believe that's either bad policy or a failure of QA.
@Dustwin For example, why did upgrading 22.04 LTS to 24.04 LTS uninstall Audacious Media Player on the machine where I'd forgotten to switch from the APT release to the Flatpak release? Why did it remove `mpv`, install Haruna, and push SMPlayer to the bottom of the file associations priority list? Why did it uninstall XSane and install Skanlite, just for me to reverse that decision after the upgrade was done. etc. etc. etc. I dunno... but it doesn't engender good feelings.
@Dustwin The problem is that, while incompetence is better than malice, it's still unnecessary and frustrating to be running into an equivalent of Microsoft's constant attempts to reset the default browser to Edge, multiple times over. Contrast that with Flatpak, where I update without a second thought because I trust the downgrade functionality to be present, reliable, and easy the next time a crash bug slips into a release build of Inkscape.
@ssokolow You can trust the maintainers, you just have a different software preference. That is a big statement that trust is broken over app source preference.