Upgrading to Ubuntu 22.04

[cimorene]

I had to upgrade because I have had Issues since the last long term support release that I fixed by upgrading to an intermediate release, and the intermediate release's support expired. Actually, though, I was having a problem with it too - web discord and desktop discord both stopped working. The upgrade fixed that. Issues I encountered:

Snap Firefox

All Ubuntu (and Ubuntu variant) Firefoxes are now provided in snap packages, a newer management system that is supposed to make it easier and smoother to update for the developers, something to do with a sandbox, and that they SAY is going to result in faster performance long-term, but currently is slower. Like when they first released 22.04 in April, users were all getting like 15-second launch times when they first clicked the app icon! So. They also made it really hard to work around this and install it the old-fashioned way. And there's a bug that I personally experienced where in fact, Firefox would not launch... at all.

1. Google suggested I should launch in safe mode and remove extensions because one of them was probably doing it! Nope, safe mode wouldn't launch. Some kind of lib issue.


2. Google suggested this lib issue was caused by a window manager bug, so I should switch from the default Ubuntu window manager to Wayland. Nope, same problem.


3. Google suggested I could switch the display driver, GDM3, to Xorg or Nvidia. I don't have an Nvidia card, so - Xorg. Nope! Same problem!


4. Google suggested I could try to satisfy the mistaken belief of the browser that a lib was missing by manually installing an old package that would contain, I guess, the old names of the lib files or... something, but it the package names were all already installed and they just switched to 'manually installed'.


5. Someone suggested I could just completely remove the Snap package and install the old-fashioned way and OMGUbuntu provided a tutorial. It worked! Buuuut it's not ideal because the desired behavior is for basically everybody to use the Snap. The manual install thing from OMGUbuntu is actually intended for developers. But it was the only fix that I could get to work, SO... ?

New appearance settings

1. Ubuntu's default style now comes with a choice of default dark or light and a choice of highlight colors, accessed through a new Appearance tab in the Settings dialogue. As a result, some of the functions previously handled by the Gnome Tweak Tool/Tweaks are now managed there. But some of them aren't: you can't change the system font or icon theme or the style of non-gtk applications from Settings. But every time you open the Appearance tag of Settings... it resets all the other settings you've changed to defaults.


2. So go to Settings, tweak the dock size/icon size, close it again and all your icons are once again ugly. Reopen Tweaks and reselect icon theme.


3. Aaaand it's also reset the appearance of the text editor and the command console to defaults every time even though you don't even control those through the Appearance tab (because text editor and command console themes are text and background color, not button color, which is what the GTK theme controls). But nope, gotta reset both of those too.

Everything else is fine now except the things that were my fault, namely, updating my music library - the tags - but trying to load old versions of playlists with the wrong filepaths. I have to manually fix my playlists now, but whatever, I guess.