Comment 16 for bug 1717878

I just got trapped by this on Ubunu 23.10. I installed fuse because an explanation of appimage said it depends on fuse and I thought "oh, fuse is good, I should make sure I have fuse installed" and I did not fully read the. An hour later the next time I closed and reopened my laptop lid, my laptop was bricked except for vterms and reboots left me with "[ OK ] Starting gdm service", no gui, and no clearer warning. I was not able to understand what happened until the IRC channel walked me through searching the systemd logs, I got the more full error message and found this bug. I had an online/televideo appointment I missed because my computer was dead for an hour and a half.

It seems to me the *biggest* problem here is that "apt install fuse" should not replace fuse3 with fuse2. I would expect if there's a PACKAGE and a PACKAGE3, that the one with the number is the outdated special version and the un-numbered version is the true one. Certainly not the other way around, that's very, very surprising behavior. I think the case of needing fuse2 is probably rare and an average user would not have the background (I did not) to understand that "installing fuse2" is wrong. Usually when installing a package uninstalls the other package it's because uninstalling the package is harmless (eg because it's an eqivalent). Even if downgrading fuse could be done without breaking the entire GUI, downgrading fuse would probably have undesirable effects and it is far too easy to do by accident.

However also, installing a common package (fuse, whichever version) should not fully break your GUI and it is surprising such a serious gotcha has been present in Ubuntu for six years.