I think that installation was originally 18.04 and I installed it when it was released. A while ago anyways and I’ve been upgrading it as new versions roll out and with the latest upgrade and snapd software it has become more and more annoying to keep the operating system happy and out of my way so I can do whatever I need to do on the computer.

Snap updates have been annoying and they randomly (and temporarily) broke stuff while some update process was running on background, but as whole reinstallation is a pain in the rear I have just swallowed the annoyance and kept the thing running.

But now today, when I planned that I’d spend the day with paperwork and other “administrative” things I’ve been pushing off due to life being busy, I booted the computer and primary monitor was dead, secondary has resolution of something like 1024x768, nvidia drivers are absent and usability in general just isn’t there.

After couple of swear words I thought that ok, I’ll fix this, I’ll install all the updates and make the system happy again. But no. That’s not going to happen, at least not very easily.

I’m running LUKS encryption and thus I have a separate boot -partition. 700MB of it. I don’t remember if installer recommended that or if I just threw some reasonable sounding amount on the installer. No matter where that originally came from, it should be enough (this other ubuntu I’m writing this with has 157MB stored on /boot). I removed older kernels, but still the installer claims that I need at least 480MB (or something like that) free space on /boot, but the single kernel image, initrd and whatever crap it includes consumes 280MB (or so). So apt just fails on upgrade as it can’t generate new initrd or whatever it tries to do.

So I grabbed my ventoy-drive, downloaded latest mint ISO on it and instead of doing something productive I planned to do I’ll spend couple of hours at reinstalling the whole system. It’ll be quite a while before I install ubuntu on anything.

And it’s not just this one broken update, like I mentioned I’ve had a lot of issues with the setup and at least majority of them is caused by ubuntu and it’s package management. This was just a tipping point to finally leave that abusive relationship with my tool and set it up so that I can actually use it instead of figuring out what’s broken now and next.

  • nottheengineer@feddit.de
    1·
    1 year ago

    Same here. Ubuntu almost made me believe that linux is a pain in the ass to use and you need to fix some shit after every update.

    Now I use arch and it’s great. Nvidia is very annoying because they constantly publish drivers that break things, but you can just roll those back and wait until they fix it again. And that gets worse as GPUs age. Apart from nvidia, I’ve had exactly one update issue (telepathy-kde being removed and causing the pacman dependency resolver to get confused) that was fixed in about 2 minutes of googling.

    • notfromhere@lemmy.one
      1·
      1 year ago

      My biggest complains with Ubuntu lately are Firefox is a snap package and when it updates it yells at me to close Firefox so it can update it and if I wait too long it forces the it closed, and it gives me countdown notifications. Annoying and something out of Windows 10 forced reboot type shit. The other is the automatic apr upgrades break cuda/nvidia drivers forcing me to reboot the whole system. Pain in the ass.

      • nottheengineer@feddit.de
        01·
        1 year ago

        Automatic updates that need reboots but run at any time other than when shutting down?

        Sounds like something microsoft would do, but even they get that part right.