What I am sick of is not change by itself. It is things being forced before they are ready for the people still using what already worked.
Wine is the best example I have right now. Wine 10 introduced the new WoW64 architecture as experimental, and Wine 11 moved further in that direction by saying pure WINEARCH=win32 prefixes are deprecated and not supported in the new WoW64 mode. On top of that, the separate wine64 loader is gone in favor of one wine loader. That may look clean on paper, but for older 32-bit software and older install chains it is not a harmless change. It breaks assumptions people have been relying on for years.
I ran straight into that with TextAloud and an old NextUp/Acapela voice. My old working setup only worked because I had already built a real 32-bit prefix the old way. That was not some random lucky install. It took time to get right, and once it worked, it worked because it was a proper 32-bit environment. With the newer WoW64 path, I could still get TextAloud itself to launch, but the setup no longer behaved the same. I had to force-install speechsdk, and even then it only half-worked. The built-in voices showed up, but my own installed voice did not register properly, so the program could not use it the way it did before. That is not a real replacement. That is a partial workaround that breaks exactly where it matters.
And what makes it worse is the mixed messaging. Winetricks will throw warnings like “You are using a 64-bit WINEPREFIX. Note that many verbs only install 32-bit versions of packages,” and there is a current issue specifically about speechsdk still insisting on a WIN32 prefix. That is exactly the sort of thing that tells users the transition is not finished, no matter how much people want to pretend it is. If the new path was actually ready, it would not be tripping over old 32-bit speech components and old verbs like this.
I tried more than just one thing. I tested the newer WoW64 route. I forced speechsdk. I compared the registry from the old working prefix with the new one. I copied over the parts that were obviously missing. I manually added Acapela-related registry entries. I got far enough that TextAloud opened and the default Microsoft voices appeared, but the custom voice still would not come through properly. In the end, the only thing that actually worked for me was launching the app through Lutris with Wine-GE 8-26 x86_64. That is the only path I found that got me back to something usable. Everything else on the new forced path either failed outright or only half-worked.
That is why I hate this kind of forced transition. I do not care how nice it sounds in release notes if the real effect is that older working setups get turned into debugging projects. If something worked before, and the replacement still cannot cover the same ground, then it is being pushed too early. That is not “fear of change.” That is people being told to accept regressions because the project wants to move on.
And it is not just Wine. KDE has already said Plasma 6.8 will be Wayland-only, with the Plasma X11 session supported only into early 2027 through the Plasma 6.7 line. So the same pattern is showing up there too: the old path is being shut down, and users are expected to move whether their use case is fully covered or not.
So my view is simple. If developers are going to force people off an old path, the new path needs to be ready first. Not “good enough for most users.” Not “fine unless you use older 32-bit software, old voices, old speech components, or old workflows.” Ready. If it is not ready, then they should not force it yet. And if enough real use cases break, then people should keep filing bugs, keep making noise, and keep pushing back until the replacement actually does the job.
Wine Bug Report