The implication is that if you see them before they see you, you’ll make sure to avoid them.

I installed 24.04 fresh on a new machine, and I’d say it’s more stable than 22.04, but has a lot more “weirdness”.

Positives:

• On 22.04, it seemed like frozen programs had a habit of crashing the entire desktop environment. That doesn’t seem to happen on 24.04.
• Like you mentioned, it seems to use new versions of many dependencies, so I’ve run into less issues installing certain programs.

Negatives:

• For whatever reason, I can no longer use Shift or Ctrl to move or copy a file. Instead of dragging a file while holding shift, I have to cut and paste it to move it. This sounds minor, but it’s deceptively annoying, and affects all programs.
• A bunch of the keyboard shortcuts (particularly in the tiling window manager) were changed. For example, there’s now two different shortcuts to expand or shrink windows.
• The dock will just randomly stop working (i.e. it doesn’t appear when you hover against the edge of the screen). The only way I’ve found to fix it is to reset the dock preferences.
• Default apps will randomly reset.
• COSMIC seems to be more prone to keeping the display turned on while on the lock screen, even when configured to sleep. This isn’t a huge deal, but it’s a bit annoying with an OLED.