One part of the integration of upstream software in a distribution is to correctly deal with changes that have a wide impact, either because they affect a lot of other software, or because the changes will be highly visible to the users. And it is easy to feel that such changes are always going wrong: some applications stop working, many users complain about the change they feel was uncalled for, nearly nobody shares a thank you note.

Such wide-impact changes always come with controversies, and being the bridge between users and upstreams, distributions are the place where all the rage is going on, with a social aspect that is usually at least as important as the technical side of things.

The recent years have not been exempt of controversies, and we will share our experiences with user-visible changes such as the move to KDE 4, GNOME 3 and systemd.

This talk will be co-presented by the SUSE Gang: Frédéric Crozat, Will Stephenson, Vincent Untz.