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After deleting an AskUbuntu question due to peer pressure pointing out that it is "off-topic because parts are off-topic, and parts are written as a rant in disguise", I decided that DevRant is where to repost this instead:

As a user, how can I make sure to keep my applications as a user without keeping obsolete software packages?

Upgrading to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellifish) using the Software Updater GUI removes a working installation of the zoom video meeting application, without installing any upgrade, during the "cleanup" step.

Unfortunately, we can only choose either to remove or keep all suggested removals. While every other removal seemed fine and had a good explanation (either an outdated version number or the move to update Firefox via snap packages in the future), only zoom, at the end of the list, was scheduled for removal without any replacement.

After proceeding with the removals and restarting my computer, as expected, zoom is gone.

I am posting this to inform others before the upgrade, but also trying to help solve the problem, so that either there should be an option to select which packages to keep or remove (maybe there is when using the command line instead of the GUI?) or not to suggest to remove zoom at all. If it had been removed as an outdated third-party source without official 22.04 support, it would have been helpful to communicate that more explicitly.

As the latest zoom version, 5.12.2 (4816) deb (for Ubuntu 16.04+), obviously supports everything from 16.04, there should be no reason at all to remove zoom when upgrading an Ubuntu distribution.

https://askubuntu.com/questions/...

Comments
  • 3
    There are two options that could suit your case:

    1. apt-mark manual zoom

    This marks the package as manually installed, which takes it out of the list of packages to clean by “apt-get autoremove”.

    Maybe this one is not applicable in this case because you had to install the package manually anyway, but if for some reason it was marked as automatically installed later on, this would mark it again as manually installed.

    2. apt-mark hold zoom

    This outright pins the package, so it won't be upgraded, removed or otherwise automatically installed by anything else. Maybe this one is a bit more extreme, but at least it gives you the chance of unholding it (apt-mark unhold zoom) to upgrade it yourself.
  • 5
    I am not able to understand why this is off topic on AskUbuntu
  • 5
    @asgs I'd say it's because Stack Overflow is a crapsack.
  • 12
    Stackoverflow:
    This looks like a rant; get the fuck outta here!

    devRant:
    This looks like a rant; Good sir, please take a seat and tell us your story.
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