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.
Apparently this is a new driver which uses the open source headers and Linux kernel modules from nVidia’s proprietary drivers, and it doesn’t borrow very much from nouveau driver because that one has different names for things in their headers due to the clean room reverse engineering aspect of nouveau. Although I am not an expert on this so I could be wrong.
I’m glad we have companies helping to push the envelope and try new things. I may not always like the direction they take things, e.g., the Unity desktop turned me off for a few releases, and I always seem to run KDE since gnome went off the rails (imo), but it doesn’t hurt anything and the whole ecosystem is probably better for it. If it hurts then people move to alternatives and hopefully Canonical backpedals, or people move on and Ubuntu withers.
I’ve upgraded several Ubuntu LTS versions to newer LTS and have been running fine. The problems come up when you wait too long and the repos don’t have the needed packages anymore. You can still fuddle your way through even that scenario and retain a fully working system.
If they have the only copy and their datacenter goes belly up, lot of good it did to have the only remaining copy because now it’s lost to existence. Offsite backups and ideally by many different organizations is the only sure-fire way to preserve this stuff. I donate to archive.org because I believe on what they’re trying to do and I hope they can continue on as long as needed.
For a desktop system, I think something like NixOS is probably the way to go. Keep your home partition then blow away the system and boot if there are ever any issues then install the system from your backed-up system config file and you’re golden.
Having gone through the Arch install myself, what part dod you find you had to babysit? Boot the install media, format the drive, mount the mounts, install system, configure the system, and done. Maybe it’s just a more involved process than you’d like?