TL;DR> I'm done with Canonical. Never using anything Ubuntu-derived again. Manjaro has been very nice so far.

Canonical really screwed the pooch hard on the 24.04 release.

First, do-release-upgrade refused to run on my system for _days_ until I managed to convince it that all traces of PPAs were actually removed. Not that it would actually _say_ which PPA was blocking it, or in fact which packages were actually installed from PPAs. If some arcane command exists to decipher that, I did not find one that works in two days of searching, despite several incantations of dpkg supposedly capable of it.

Then, when do-release-upgrade managed to not install even an 'init' script, resulting in a kernel panic within 70ms of booting, I decided to fall back to installing the OS over the top of the old one. This used to be an okay option; however, due to some bug that popped up that broke authentication of old accounts in some very narrow edge cases, Canonical removed the option to install without formatting. Clean installs or do-release-upgrade, no other option.

So, I'm running Manjaro now. I'm extremely happy with how quickly I got used to the yay/pacman/pamac, and how intuitive it is to find and install the thing I want. The sheer volume of documentation is smaller for Manjaro than Ubuntu, but that's actually a bonus; many search efforts for my problems dug up answers that stopped meaning anything over a decade ago because I was hitting a bug last seen in Ubuntu 12.04 or something.

I may be experience a placebo effect, but it also just feels snappier; I do know at the very least that snap and flatpak were not installed by default, and that probably takes a bunch of work out of the hands of systemd, so...

Given how many ubuntu systems I have right now that cannot be upgraded in-place, I may switch to Manjaro (or something else Arch-based) just across the board, as I go. That's a fileserver, two Pi servers, and one VPS that got orphaned years ago and is probably so full of security holes the only thing keeping it from being pwned is obscurity...

#Canonical #Ubuntu #Arch #Manjaro #Linux