Yes. I would hope /any/ OS has changes over time to continually improve, as long as those changes are properly documented and have a valid deprecation pathway, it's not an issue for software under activate maintenance.

The problem with Ubuntu is that they have made, and are accelerating, changes that provide no relevant benefits for most use cases and without good documentation or deprecation pathways, and with core OS functionality. They are making a lot of user-hostile changes that are intended to push users towards using Canonical created tooling and systems away from standardized techniques that work across distributions (e.g. the move from /etc/network/interfaces to netplan, the current push towards snaps away from apt packages).

By contrast, the changes in something like Alpine are much easier to deal with as part of our maintenance. Many of the changes are more negatively impactful for use-cases are Alpine that are outside of containerized applications, so they don't impact us.

Would somewhat agree/disagree. Debian installer is kind of a monster, but Ubuntu's changes to the installer broke compatibility with tried-and-tested PXE install software (i.e. Cobbler).

Ubuntu's packaging of Firefox as a Snap (outside of apt) though is very much a surprise at first, and makes it easy to mistake your system/browser as being up-to-date... And that Firefox Snap container is not sandboxed like OpenBSD, and has full filesystem access.

Given the privilege escalations in sudo and the bajillion untestable features built-in, arguably the Linux community should've moved on from it many years ago, following OpenBSD's lead...