I have to start this off making it very clear that Elementary OS is one of my favourite Linux distributions and I want to see this thing succeed and prosper, hopefully taking up the realm of THE Linux distro to go to, as Ubuntu was at the time I started using Linux operating systems.
However, it has its problems, serious problems.
Most of them are already getting fixed, like the situation with flatpaks on their app store and the overall lack of apps, this all gets better with time, it's natural.
But something that Elementary OS should've put in place years ago and still hasn't and has so far shown no interest in doing so are in-place updates.
If you're not aware, Elementary OS requires you to reinstall your entire system whenever a new version comes out, making it essential to separate your /home and root partition; whilst this is generally a good practice, it's still annoying to some, specially for me. Every single distribution I've used has let me update whenever a new version came out without reinstalling the whole thing.
Heck, I went from Windows 8 to 8.1 to 10 to 11 on a laptop with no issues without having to reinstall.
Elementary OS itself is based on Ubuntu, which has been doing this for years and years.
Be it through the system upgrade dialog or the terminal, Ubuntu has never disappointed me with this, so I genuinely do not understand why Elementary can't do the same thing, why it's so hard to get it working.
Current Elementary users don't even seem to care about it, they just go
"Reinstalling is easy bro"
Yes, it is, but it's also inconvenient. You lose all your apps, and having to download an iso and then everything back again and sometimes even having to set things up because for some reason some things don't save on /home can take quite some time.
I'm not the only one complaining about this, I see this sentiment on every Elementary OS video I watch, or any article. People just like me saying they'll only hop to it in case it gets a more streamlined upgrade path.
For now, I'll just tinker with it, despite absolutely loving its direction. It's sad that one of the best distributions out there has such a major flaw and I really hope it gets fixed because it's what's going to make me move over from Fedora/Ubuntu.
We've come far, we can keep going. This distro deserves its spotlight and getting such features is essential