there are reasons upgrading sucks

Kubuntu 26.04 LTS was released back in April, but I've resisted upgrading from 24.04 LTS for two reasons. The last upgrade went not-so smoothly, and I hate upgrading.

My experience upgrading from 24.04 LTS to 26.04 LTS was as follows:

The graphical installer spit back an error that it couldn't upgrade, but without giving me too much info as to why, so I did it the Terminal (Konsole) way...

sudo apt update
sudo apt full-upgrade

(reboot)

sudo do-release-upgrade -m desktop

...which told me something called go-mtpfs was causing some issue. The installer said I had the option to ignore the error and continue, or stop and find the "correct" version/release or whatever. I stopped, ran into Synaptic Package Manager, uninstalled go-mtpfs since it's just for Android stuff, then ran the above commands again. No errors after that, and things continued normally.

Out of the entire upgrade process I only had to answer something like 3 or 4 yes/no questions. Just boot loading stuff for the most part, if I remember correctly.

After reboot, done. This was how it went for both computers.

Getting to the desktop was fine, but where things broke had to do with a switch from X11 to Wayland, so I had to switch back to X11, and that fixed almost everything.

I had to change window settings to turn off crap like floating taskbar, "wobbly windows" and a few other things. The fortunate part is that I got things back to looking and acting how I prefer.

Some things were fixed and improved. I now have sound events for connect/disconnect of USB devices (24.04 LTS never got that right), 7-Zip works better, GIMP now has a light mode to get rid of the default dark mode garbage, and LibreOffice while at a newer version still looks and acts the same, which is good.

The last time I upgraded from one LTS to the next, it went... meh. Some stuff outright broke where I had to use workarounds to fix things. For this upgrade, there were fewer workarounds. That's about the best I can say about it.

Why I hate upgrading

Back in the Windows 7 days, I purposely locked down the OS so absolutely nothing auto-upgraded. Windows updates were shut off. Main browser at the time was Firefox ESR, with extra configuration to block auto-updating (I only updated when it was absolutely necessary). For docs and spreadsheets, OpenOffice 4.1.7 with updates off. For other software I used, same deal. I brought whatever I was using up to the software version I knew did everything I wanted, then stopped updating.

I ran Win7 like that for years with no problems whatsoever. The only time I ever blew up 7 was when I did dumb stuff, such as trying to edit large videos the computer couldn't handle, or using a crappy USB stick or whatever.

The upgrade hate comes from knowing that a) turning all the updates off results in a very pleasant, easy and fast computing experience, and b) turning updates on can and will jack things up.

Unfortunately, no modern OS can be run 100% no-update style like Win7, and that's mainly due to the web browser. Chrome, Firefox, some forked thing, whatever, doesn't matter. The browser has to be updated or certain web sites will break on attempt to use them. And since the browser doesn't run as an island unto itself like it used to, the whole OS needs to be kept updated.

At least the Linux issues I dealt with could be fixed. The desktop environment crap I mentioned above is an example of that. After upgrading, some stuff got enabled I didn't want, so I turned it off. Or, if it were something that majorly frustrated me, I could junk KDE temporarily or entirely by switching to Xfce or any number of others.

It is when I'm not "allowed" to fix issues that I want to start throwing things. Win11 is, of course, notorious for this. For five years -- FIVE -- no small taskbar option. Only now does Win11 finally have it, along with being able to put the taskbar on top, bottom, left or right side of the screen. That will make some people jump for joy, but the point is that for FIVE years, it was a completely unfixable problem with stock 11. In Linux, the wait time to fix a problem is fewer than five minutes if you know what you're doing.

There may come a point in the future when I switch off KDE in favor of something more lightweight and custom code in all the features I want. That might be Xfce or something lighter like fluxbox. KDE Plasma is what I use, but I know the only way to really get a web browser's meat hooks out of the GUI and back to being an island unto itself is with a lightweight environment.

For now, 26.04 LTS works, such as it is.