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Comment by neilsimp1 | Hacker News Reader

People using KDE Plasma and not using some sort of rolling release distro are missing out, I think. 5.18 LTS was a very very solid release, but 5.19 and 5.20 have so much new that it's a bummer for people whose distros won't be seeing them any time soon.

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On the other hand, I'm running KDE Neon (the "stable" version, insofar as there is one) where everything is supposed to "just work" and even there I got a really dumb dependency error this morning[0] that lead to KWIN almost automatically uninstalling itself to "fix" the problem. This has happened a few times in the last months - including the desktop wanting to uninstall itself.

Of course I know how to behave in that context, and I don't want to sound ungrateful since I get all of this quality software for free, but it somewhat saddens me that I still can't recommend these kinds of distros to my family.

[0] https://imgur.com/a/9OeZsjW

I really think Linux should make it harder somehow to uninstall critical parts of your operating system.

I'm sure it might not be easy to work out a mechanism for this that would not add friction for those who need to swap out large components of their desktop experience, but I personally think this is one of those things that sometimes really scares people about Linux (along with rm -Rf /)

Every couple years I find myself not paying enough attention to the apt update text and then I end up swearing off any interaction with Linux for months.

Why would apt uninstall things automatically? I’ve never noticed pacman doing that but maybe I’m lucky

Sometimes a newer version of package A will declare that it conflicts with package B. Maybe package C depended on both before the conflict was added. Then the package manager might find that the only way to resolve all conflicts is to remove C, which then auto-removes everything C depended on. Maybe C happens to be the "kububtu-desktop" package.

That seems like a poor design in apt. Does any other package manager allow such a thing? I know Arch's pacman has no autoremove - you have to gather a list of unneeded packages then remove them as a separate step. And Gentoo's emerge builds a dependency tree rooted in the @world package set, so if kde-plasma/plasma-meta is there it will never be removed by an automatic depclean.

apt does try to keep track of unneeded packages/dependencies though - and will suggest you remove them with apt autoremove. This should always be safe... Unless a package is missing dependency information (has a packaging bug).

I really think Linux should make it harder somehow to uninstall critical parts of your operating system.

Yes. This was one of the things we had to polish way back in the first Linux boom when I was working at Lindows. We got a report from QA that "when I uninstall this random thing called dpkg I can no longer use the app store". After the lead dev managed to collect himself from off the hallway floor (the only literal ROFL I have ever seen), everyone realized that yes, you should be prevented from uninstalling the core software.

To be fair, that is not "the desktop wanting to uninstall itself", as if it is a problem in Plasma, but it is the package manager wanting to uninstall the desktop. It seems to be a problem with the Ubuntu packages. If the same thing happened a few times, maybe it is time for a bugreport at Ubuntu.

I meant "the KDE Desktop Package", but your point stands, thanks

I am using some old LTS version and I am fine, I run Arch many years ago so I had my time of updating to latest and greatest but now I no longer need latest apps or libraries and only thinking that the next system update will bring me new bugs or changes I don't want to handle at this moment does not appeal to me anymore.

When I need something I will intentionally up[grade that program (for my IDE I keep old versions around to revert) and for my system I upgraded my video driver only when I had to, the rest is all LTS stiff.

Just making my a point that for some people the updates is no longer(or was never) an exiting thing and as long as your current machine just works there is no reason to break it.

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