Ubuntu Epic Fail

I had forgotten what a hot mess the update from 20.04 LTS to 22.04 LTS was, so after ignoring the update reminders for months I decided I finally had time to do the upgrade on two of my machines. Both upgrades failed miserably. Both failed to complete the update. I got them both going again, temporarily... My main machine is still working, but it clearly has issues that are going to need to be resolved. The other machine worked fine for a while, but a few days ago it stopped booting. Initially it was saying that it was 24.04, but prior to the boot fail it was reporting 22.04 again. Fortunately, I had moved the user home directories to a separate internal hard drive, so I haven't lost any data, but I've spent the last 3 days trying to get a clean install working. Most things work on the first account I created, but zero snap-based apps work on the second account (they all completely refuse to run) and the user hard drive won't mount at all for either account. The critical apps not working on the second account are the final straw and the absolute deal killer.

After 20+ years using Ubuntu, and as my sole OS for the last 15+ years, I'm kicking Ubuntu to the curb forever. There's no excuse for what is supposed to be the most stable version being this bug-riddled and unusable. Every LTS upgrade just gets worse and worse. It's never been completely smooth sailing, but the last 3 or 4 have gotten so bad that now it's just not worth it to me anymore to spend multiple days on each machine fixing everything the update breaks.

The bizarre thing is that the Live USB (the same one I used for the install) works perfectly on these machines. It recognizes all the drives and everything is accessible and working. Why the heck is the full install so broken when the Live USB it comes from works perfectly?

One thing I know for certain: the Snap system is NOT ready for release and needs to be canned until it actually works. I haven't had a single snap-based app work completely, even in 22.04 that was otherwise working fine. There was always some functionality in every snap that didn't work.

Update: I installed Linux Mint 22 and the experience is 1,000 times better than Ubuntu so far. Everything works, it boots much faster, and all the stuff that was giving me fits with Ubuntu is just gone. The one caveat is that I can't (yet) get the start menu panels set up the way I like them, but that's a minor thing, especially considering all the issues that are completely gone.