Another problem upgrading to 19.10

[Paul Smith]

On Wed, 23 Oct 2019 at 16:45, Thomas Tanghus <thomas at tanghus.net> wrote:
> Yeah, I kinda got some idea what to do next, just getting tired. I've been
> using GNU/Linux for 25+ years, and I'm tired of this stuff. Please tell me
> other OSes are just as error prone ;)

On Wed, 2019-10-23 at 17:19 +0200, Liam Proven wrote:
> I know *exactly* what you mean.
>  ...
> I work with openSUSE on a daily basis now. I ran it on a couple of my
> own machines for a while. It's quite nice in a lot of ways, actually.
> I have also been experimenting with Devuan, which is harder work -- it
> would be, it's based on Debian -- but has some pleasing aspects.

To be clear, I think Thomas is talking about support for in-place
upgrade to newer releases, not "desktop spit and polish" issues or even
from-scratch installer issues.  So I don't think this message does
address *exactly* what he means :)

The answer is, upgrade is always fraught.  I had the worst problems
upgrading MacOS on my MacBook (had one for work for a while), actually,
so even the most user-facing OS has these issues.  And I did very
little customization on that system.

There are not many Ubuntu systems out there, outside of simple VMs or
containers, which have exactly the same set of packages installed with
the same configuration.  This makes it impossible to fully test
upgrades as they might affect all users.  And the further one gets from
the "baseline" system, the harder it gets (for example, if you install
a different window system, or de-configure some systemd components, or
have some rare packages installed for unusual hardware, etc.)

And, sometimes something is just boffed; that is rare in Ubuntu but
does happen especially in non-LTS releases.