No, the root of my concern is that there is A LOT of deprecation and changes lately.
I use ublue-os as a whole because I was annoyed by Arch-based breaking so much in 2023 (glibc, libcrypto-3, grub). In the first place, I switched from Windows because I don’t want to be bothered - I want to setup my system once, and then keep using it, without things randomly breaking and/or requiring manual intervention from me. The ublue-os Mission page stating that the project is somewhat “maintenance mode” and focused on contributing to upstream actually appealed to me in this case.
Now, at the same time, there is a push for yet another new GUI app store. One that is just around a month old, which is very young for a FOSS project (and we’ve seen how even forks just dies pretty quickly in weeks) yet is pushed as “the solution to getting apps and getting paid for users and developers”. It is also announced on General thread and there is a video where it is running on Bazzite.
How am I to trust that this isn’t another Bluefin LTS? It is, seemingly, a ublue-os wide move so I can’t just ignore it as “Bluefin doing Bluefin experiments, and I’ll get it once it matures.” No, it’s significant effort put into an experimental thing, that will become part of ublue-os, that is done - due to the timing of it - seemingly at the expense of other things that has been there for ages.
I’m not going to stay silent until I’m affected. I have my concerns and doubt towards ublue-os suitability for me. Legitimately, between this and Xbox Ally announcement, I have thoughts about just moving back to Windows when they release Xbox mode. Or just installing SteamOS so that I’m not bothered by what’s going on in the ublue upstream.
I just want clarity of what will and will not be supported going forward. This wave of deprecations, new experiments, more deprecations, and then not communicating clearly what I need to do and be aware of reminds me of how I dropped Manjaro because the maintainers did something similar with regards to Mesa h264 codecs.
I’m fine with doing some maintenance on my stuff - I’m not fine if it’s not clear what is actually going on and how much I can trust anything new or old in the project. I’m fine with deprecation, but I hate feeling like my early buy-in into ublue-os ecosystem is possibly being left behind.
Battery life is more an issue with manufacturer driver and hardware. The only way it could be fixed, properly, if Linux adoption gets enough driver and hardware. Which is something I can get behind, and major driver for why I had come to tolerate and push for Bazaar - because I thought it was going to solve getting apps on all distro and Linux as a whole.
Getting apps is part of the larger issue in getting more users on Linux; not everyone is PewDiePie who is willing to learn, a lot of people are Linus from LTT who barely does any research who just want their workflow to work, and will blame Linux if something breaks.
This is why I’m in favor of an official Flathub GUI that supersedes whatever weird thing other distro does with their GUI software package manager. A lot of people are going to complain, but if Linux gets to the point that developers has to account for it because Linux gets polished to the EU, Chinese, or just vendor can use it because they don’t want to pay and beholden to Microsoft – then it’ll be all worth it.
To a degree - a lot of functions I expect from my DE, that’s standard because it is part of the server side decorations, are just broken on new Gtk apps. Things like right click menu being much more limited than KDE’s native one. Global Menu, Menu icon on titlebar, and menubar as a whole is gone. It barely follows my window button setting - but no support for keep on top and pin to all desktop button. Custom actions on the titlebar is gone, I can’t just scroll on the titlebar to move an app between desktop, nor can I middle click to shade the app. Headerbar is undismissable, I prefer to have titlebar disappear when I maximized the window.
It is fine for the normal app function, but new Gtk comes into my environment and override what I can and cannot do with apps’ window, that otherwise functions correctly on any other toolkit (like Gtk3). I’ve gotten to the point where I would choose electron app over libadwaita, and I cheered when I heard Bottles getting remade to potentially use electron to support macOS as well (I think they choose something else, but I don’t care, as long as it isn’t Gtk4 and libadwaita).
Again, I’ll underline that I can tolerate it. But it’s tolerance that comes from tiredness and powerlessness, not happyness.