The PPAs weren’t that useful. I mean they worked fine for the purpose, but if you used too many of them you’d eventually get your system into a dependency hell. That meant packages were stuck without updates and also blocking others from updating.

The other thing was that even if you kept clear of PPAs it was anybody’s guess if you could upgrade to the next release. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t and you’d have to reinstall from scratch.

Put together it meant after a while you didn’t bother upgrading period, or upgraded only major releases but by reinstalling from scratch every single time (and preserving /home). It was a chore and I resented it and kept putting it off.