I hear ya, especially with respect to upgrades. Like without fail MYSQL Plugin will always be missing, QtWebsockets won't build automatically, and even now on ubuntu 18.04 which ships with openssl1.1.0 I discovered all my applications can no longer use https properly until I downgraded libssl to 1.0.2
Also: I'm assuming the 64 core machine is ARM? Which provider do you use for that?