Linux updates are awesome

I just updated my laptop (a Lenovo ThinkPad S1 Yoga) from Ubuntu 19.04 to the new Ubuntu 19.10 (beta). The last time I did a fresh install was one year ago, when I installed Ubuntu 18.10.

The whole upgrade process went through within less than 30 minutes, to which I also count re-enabling disabled PPAs (they get disabled to prevent the system from breaking), removing old and obsolete packages and disabling snapd, which got automatically installed, because the native Chromium package in Ubuntu got replaced with the Chromium snap app. (In the end I just removed Chromium completely from my system, I don’t need Chromium.) I don’t like snaps for their auto-updates, centralization etc. and prefer using flatpaks instead.

But although I was a bit annoyed about the snapd installation, all in all the upgrade process was still much more pleasant than every Windows update I have ever done. A usual small update in Windows (like one of those monthly bug and security updates) takes longer than a major Ubuntu / Linux update. A major Windows update often takes hours and also breaks things sometimes.

Now that I use 3 different operating systems on a regular base (Windows on my Surface Go, Ubuntu on my ThinkPad and Fedora Silverblue), the more I learn to appreciate the advantages of each.

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