People really underestimate the value of stability and predictability.
There are some amazing FOSS projects out there ran by folks who don’t give a crap about stability or the art of user experience. It holds them back, and unfortunately helps drive a fragmented ecosystem where we get 2,3,5 major projects all trying to do the same thing.
Immich is quite new clearly say they will have breaking changes.
Stable release planned for this year
The updates are almost always packed with cool new features so I’d rather have an amazing app with a bit of maintenance then get something stable that lacks features. Especially when stability is now just around the corner.
As far as breaking changes go, in the year of me using the docker install I’ve had maybe 3 updates that required me to change things and each one was leas than 10 mins of work. Pretty basic stuff if you are actually on the selfhosted path. Most people complaining seem to like auto updating apps automatically which seems crazy. I update when I have time to mess around, otherwise it just chugs along super stable.
I wanted to like immich, but it felt like everytime I opened it there was a little box saying there was a new version available. Which would be fine except for when that new version wasn’t compatible with the server version I was running, and upgrading that frequently needed changes to my compose file because they changed some option or library or something.
I just want something that can store pictures of my family without a lot of tinkering.
The issue here is that these are solvable problems, release compat isn’t a new problem. It’s just a problem that takes dedicated effort to solve for, just like any other feature.
This is something FOSS apps tend to lack simply due to the nature of how contributions tend to work for free software. Which is an unfortunate reality, but a reality none the less.
