It's irrational to expect any OS to anticipate and play nice with any and all of thousands - millions - of possible modifications, customizations and software combinations and leave everything perfectly intact through a major OS update. All things considered, I'm impressed with how perfectly the OS updates have gone. Much better than my old Android phone did.

As I said, I've never lost anything on my fairly highly customized N900 except the power-kernel stuff I knew would be gone. Nothing, from the custom boot video to widgets to email settings to icons changed at all! As a long-time Linux user I knew I very likely wouldn't - and shouldn't - lose anything, considering the changes I'd made. As a proclaimed long-time Linux user you should've pretty much known what to expect too. IOW, through your Linux knowledge you should've known which modifications or customizations were of a type vulnerable to change or loss in a major OS update. So it's still on you.

we agree very much. i do see the same problem as you see. but i also see solutions to the problem. and we need them now. we need the "dumb" user to do things that previously were reserved for experienced admins. this is imo the leap to take. *nix has all the concepts we need for that. what we need now in addition to that is to make them "userproof". the good things that was given to admins to maintain systems comfortably we need now for the users(failproof).

this is a phone and users love to install addons on a phone, customize it and ... this a serious usecase that imo cannot be done away by saying: users never were able to do this.

you have the apple store, you have ovi, you have xyz store : this is what the user want and should get. again: this is imo a serious usecase.
yes: /i/ can configure my phone so that it does what i want.
and /i/ can fix most problems that might occur. but this is not about if some experienced folks can use the phone. this is about the avarage user who wants to use the phone and just want it to work and want to have a great userexperience.

like i said apt indeed handles it for a long time. like i said the debian slogan for a long time was "and it never changes your settings"

further maemo actually does it most of the time excactly the way i want it! even more there is a standard that says how it has to be to work and it exists for a very long time. so far to impossible.

i share your pain @ OP

but the part with the apps not being backupped.... well thats just bad luck

other than that, it was very inconvenient to get my device updated.
i had to use "faster appmanager" to update OTA. no official way of updating worked. OTA from the official appmanager asked me to use the pc suite. pc suite said that i'll loose everything so i should backup. not too much of a problem, but still kinda annoying considering the fast appmanager did OTA-update without complaining a single time.

I for one do agree that updates have been very smooth from downloading to installation. But dude seriously atleast dont lie... Icons revert back to stock icons after maemo updates !

hi,
i think i made my point. and i think not looking at issues will not improove maemo while looking at issues will. and it might be good to look at discussions led 20+ years ago(and earlier regarding filesystem) about similar things on servers wich were no different. many years are gone and again and again the same arguments from some while others develope solutions. those with the solutions prevail not the ones who insist to keep their shortcommings.
i'm out of this thread. peace!