Time to Leave Ubuntu - don't update to 24.04

[Tas_mania]

After investigating what's going on (wrong) with Ubuntu 24.04 I've come to the conclusion it's permanent.

   

Canonical and Msoft has been working together for some years now with Msoft attending Ubuntu conferences. Nothing wrong with that except these are contradictory economic systems. Ubuntu get most of their software for free from Debian and volunteer programmers. Somehow this good will has been corporatized in a partnership that is supposed to be good for the users. I don't believe it. This is all about money.

It was just a matter of time before Ubuntu started breaking -down.

   

The problem with Msoft is they force people to jump thru endless hoops and deviations to get anything done. I don't like that.

So I'm moving on possibly to Debian. Debian 12.5 looks good and is a reputable distribution. BTW I don't thing Mint is going to be sucked-in to the Canonical vortex

[Tas_mania]

Now that Ubuntu 24.04 has been out for a month or so I thought I would check what the reaction has been. As predicted not so good I would say.
It's actually sad for long time Ubuntu users, more so for newcomers coming from Windows. I ran into brick walls when asking questions on Ubuntu forums and gave up.

The big issue is Snaps and how Canonical hijacked 'sudo apt install' and turned it into 'sudo snap install'. They could have been honest about it. The issue I identified earlier this year is that Snaps are really AppImages that have been signed by Canonical. Except that the AppImage format and by extension Snaps relies on other packaging systems to establish dependencies. So an Ubuntu system is destined to start to break as dependencies fail to be met. I don't think a Snap pack can provide dependencies for other Snap packs. If you know the answer to this drop it in the comments.

The other thing I didn't like was 'Ubuntu Pro' which is supposed to be an updating enhancement except now you have to provide an email address to Canonical. I think Canonical was cynical about what they bundled into Pro. Ffmpeg and Imagemagick are there and now VLC has been added. These are packages that don't have a clear-cut GPL license because of video codecs etc. Strange users didn't need Canonical as a middle man last year but now they do?

I think Ubuntu has started to punish users who don't enable Ubuntu Pro and they will stop other things from working. A waste of time really because apparently lots of things aren't working.

I've been around long enough to know the foundation of many distros has been their packaging systems. Debian had debs and RedHat/Fedora had rpms. I've made both and the bar was set high on purpose with these packaging systems. Now apparently we don't need to worry because faceless backroom boys will do it all. Isn't that the exact reason most of us switched to Linux? So we could use the OS how we wanted.

   

[rich2005]

On Upgrading

Just starting to try out a kubuntu 24.04 (as a VM). It does have a minimal installation option which is beneficial when it it comes to finding required dependencies and rolling back failed experiments. There is a Gimp 2.10.38 in the Panda Jim PPA and that installs but no python2. A couple of attempts at installing old python2 packages failed with broken dependencies.

Fortunately kubuntu 24.04 can still install Synaptic package manager. For whatever reason snapd is not installed (a blessing) but apparmor is. Uninstall that to get the Gimp 2.99.19 appimage working. Those packages libfuse2t64 and libfuse3-3 are installed.

Your Gimp 2.10.38 works fine both stand-alone and as a launcher for the PPA version. Why both ? I do need a printer (& scanner) plus preferably the gutenprint package and never had much luck getting those working with an appimage. I can run the python-less Gimp for scanning / printing.

Will I be installing a kubuntu 24.04 soon ? Probably not. I am writing this on a kubuntu 20.04 machine where everything I need works, including some (very old) stuff. I do have a laptop with kubuntu 22.04 where nearly everything works and still gets large security updates with monotonous regularity.

I always ask myself, do I need the latest-and-greatest, and come up with the not really answer.