Good day. As I install various versions of Ubuntu on a few virtual machines and computers and also use Debian on some as well, there is naturally an important comparison to be made between the Debian and Ubuntu release cycles. Ubuntu has stabilised on a twice yearly release cycle but the LTS releases are every two years and as I am now finding, the 5 years of support for an LTS release is much preferable to only a few months for intermediate releases. Recently I have had to deal with systems installed with Disco releases that are now not being supported for updates as what I understood to be about two years of support has been dropped to just nine months resulting in 404 errors when apt attempts to contact the servers for updates. This in turn affects the ability to install new software as well as update existing packages.
This realisation leads me to conclude that as far as any version of Ubuntu is concerned, it is best to stick with LTS unless you are intending to keep updating every year or twice a year to the latest release. For my laptop that is only used occasionally I am depending on it being able to be installed with new software at any time and not have the situation I had this week where I was unable to install Zoom because the supporting packages for the installation were not available from the official repositories. I was then forced to update to a later version before being able to complete the installation.
For this type of situation we must therefore conclude that it is best to rely on the Ubuntu LTSs which like Debian come out less frequently but are supported for a longer period. The latest LTS is 20.04 (Focal) and hopefully it won’t need to be updated until at least 2 years when the next LTS comes out for the software I use on the laptop because I don’t want to be caught the same way again. The best thing that can be said is that you can streamline a reinstall by remounting /home to a separate partition and then install as much software as you can to your home folders but this is not possible to achieve for software that relies on apt, dpkg or snap to install. I have only been able to achieve this with portable type software such as AppImage that can be placed into any path as a single file and run there, as well as Firefox Developer and Thunderbird which are designed as portable applications that can run from any folder path and consist of multiple files and folders that can be extracted to any path from an archive.