A vocal minority can also serve as a canary in a coal mine. If the (unrealistic) ideal is 100% of users who upgrade face no issues at all, then there is something to note when a rough gauge shows it’s only true for about 80-90%. This is further compounded when there’s a common variable: notably KDE, and more specifically a particular version of KDE. These are showstopper issues and serious breaks in workflow. (I’m certain that if the poll was separated into the different DEs, you’d see the KDE users even lower than 83% of “no issues”. Might even be 80% or as low as 70%.
So I made a conscious decision to hold off on KDE 5.25.5 for my primary computer because of the reports of a “minority of users”.
These users are usually correct, and the longstanding upstream KDE bug reports further make the point. (The developers are in too deep and likely lack enough manpower. There’s a recurring theme of “We fixed something, which breaks something else, and now we’ll try to fix the new bug with…”)
There are also the “quiet” or “I don’t care” users, who simply change their workflow to accommodate poor designs or bugs. In their eyes, there are no issues with KDE.
“Meh. I don’t care if it keeps opening up new tabs when I create a new compressed archive.”
“I don’t usually keep Dolphin open that long.”
“Who even needs thousands of photos in the same folder? I’ll just put them into a bunch of subfolders.”
“Meh, my external SSD is fast enough to keep recreating thumbnails, I don’t care if they’re never cached.”
“Whatever, it’s just a silly error message in the tray, but apparently nothing got corrupted. Doesn’t bother me.”
“Sure it looks like Plasma froze during a move operation from a network SMB share, but as long as I wait long enough, the files should still move to the new folder and I won’t lose anything. Just have to wait for it to unfreeze. It rarely happens anyways.”
“Yeah it’s kind of annoying that dragging my windows away from the side of the screen resizes it to be incredibly small and almost unusable, but I can always just make the window look normal again.”