They work reasonably well, you can update them whenever you want and they are optional. Your Firefox installation won’t suddenly turn into a Flatpak overnight.

This kind of heavy handed management of change is unacceptable. Ubuntu deserves all the bad publicity they’re getting from this.

Then again, change is always hard, so there’s no easy way around this problem. Once canonical has implemented all the major changes they have in mind, Ubuntu could be worth testing again. In the meantime, it’s hard to recommend it to anyone.

Fedora is clearly a safer choice even though it too changes frequently. I used to update my system through the GUI, but over the years, that method became unreliable, and eventually broke completely. I ended up updating through the CLI instead, which isn’t something I can remember to everyone.