That said, I find myself increasingly at odds with the direction they're taking. The whole Snap vs. Flatpak debacle is exhausting, and personally, I'm not a fan of either. I'd take a standard apt repo over containerized desktop apps any day. Seeing core applications migrate to Snaps and the recent decision to move coreutils to alternate implementations feels like a bridge too far for my taste.

There's also the creeping Proprietary integrations to consider. To be honest, this is more of a philosophical stance than a practical one. Ubuntu is still a fantastic "get work done" distro, and I still use it on my office laptop because it just works and it's the only destro that got my employer's stamp of approval.

But for my personal setup? I've moved on. It's Arch for the desktop and Debian for servers. Nothing else really hits that sweet spot of control and simplicity for me anymore.

I want my OS updates to be boring. Granted I'm using Kubuntu (Ubuntu with KDE) so the Gnome stuff has nothing to do with my use, but the fact that there is nothing there that I have to fix or anticipate or work around or develop a new workflow for is terrific. That's what I love about the Ubuntu family - the last time I had a major upheaval with my desktop system was the year after KDE 4.0 was released... I think over a decade and a half ago. I really have not had to think about my desktop since.

I used this for a long time and still do sometimes. However, Arch works well enough now that I don't need to bother with Windows anymore. It is much more efficient for working with containers as there is no VM involved.

> This work includes fully managing deb packages directly in App Center, beginning the deprecation of older system tools

Are the CLI apps dpkg, apt and, well, snap all of them "older system tools"? Are we going to be cattle-prodded into the GUI?

As an especial what the fuck are you doing, for the LTS 24.04 release that nvidia tested against, canonical decided to upgrade their kernel, without bumping their minor revision number, to one that cuda doesn't run on. Downgrading that to the kernel 24.04 originally shipped with broke zfs, which Ubuntu made a huge fuss about shipping out of the box.

Damned thing is running now (without zfs, and gnome won't start), and I think I've killed the automated updates system, but it definitely doesn't have robust wont-fall-over vibes.

So for Canonical, if you see this, don't change the kernel you've released with if you aren't also changing the version number.

> laying the groundwork

So with constant focus, how many more years before the feeling is reached on top of that groundwork . The map is rather fuzzy

I've officially missed a whole cycle!

jkjk, thanks for the hard work, I'll wait as long as it takes.