Yeah, that happens to me all the time too. Makes me crazy. But I’m also able to keep Syncthing running 24/7 in the background all the while. Background services need to keep an active notification to avoid being unceremoniously killed.

See: https://dontkillmyapp.com/

Most of these problems are vendor-specific. I don’t think this is likely to be a problem on AOSP, particularly if you’re not actively switching apps.

Some phones can route power directly from USB when plugged in, with or without a battery. It helps reduce heat and battery wear when leaving the device plugged in 24/7.

Not sure off the top of my head which brands/models do this. IIRC Pixel phones do, though perhaps only the last few generations.

I’m on Bazzite now. It certainly made my life easier as far as GPU drivers go.

However, be aware that it comes with its own learning curve. It’s an “immutable” distro, and it has like half a dozen different ways to install software. You can’t use dnf like you would on regular Fedora. The idea is to get apps from Flatpak, or use Distrobox, or use Homebrew — all things that run on top of the base OS so you can use a monolithic “immutable” OS image. There are pros and cons to this approach.

Once I familiarized myself with Distrobox (BoxBuddy makes this a lot easier) and using Flatseal to grant Flatpak apps direct access to the folders they need to operate (like my music library on an external drive, in the case of my music player), it’s been pretty smooth sailing. But I do miss just being able to run sudo apt install <whatever>.

Well that sucks. You might be able to try “The Debian Way” mentioned here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Upgrades#The_Debian_way_of_upgrading

(Ubuntu is derived from Debian, which is why “the Debian way” works.)

The gist is to replace all instances of “noble” with “oracular” in your /etc/apt/sources.list file, then run some commands to do the distro upgrade.

Cool. I could well be wrong about the double-step requirement. It sure sounds that way, but the Upgrade Notes page is very old so maybe it’s easier now? Keep us posted!

On further investigation, it looks like you’d need to do an in-between upgrade to 24.10 before going to 25.04. I didn’t realize that before. It’s been a long time since I upgraded an Ubuntu system.

Here is the relevant documentation you’d need for upgrades:

From 24.04 to 24.10: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/OracularUpgrades/#Upgrading_Ubuntu_Desktops_to_24.10

And then basically the same thing again to go from 24.10 to 25.04: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PluckyUpgrades#Upgrading_Ubuntu_Desktops_to_25.04

In case you’re not familiar with Ubuntu’s naming and update conventions, I’ll explain briefly, because it’s confusing for beginners: Each release has a name and number. The names loop through the alphabet in the format “Adjective Animal”, and the numbers are the release date in format “year.month”, with new releases every six months, in April and October. Then there are the “Long Term Support” (LTS) releases that are released every two years, matching the April “xx.04” main releases. You’re currently on “Noble Numbat” (24.04), which is followed by “Oracular Oriole” (24.10) and “Plucky Puffin” (25.04). Totally intuitive, right?! -_-

OR you could back up your stuff and install a clean 25.04. I’m not sure if the installer has an option to retain an existing home folder. Again, it’s been a long time since I used Ubuntu specifically. Perhaps someone with more recent experience can chime in.

You didn’t mention which version of Ubuntu Studio you’re running. Is it 24.04 LTS by any chance?

My initial thought is that you are probably running Wayland, and that your version of Ubuntu has KDE Plasma 5 instead of 6 and/or outdated Nvidia drivers that don’t work super well with Wayland.

A quick search shows that this is all default on Ubuntu Studio 24.04 LTS, which is the first version you’ll find at ubuntustudio.org. :(

Ubuntu 25.04 (non-LTS) has Plasma 6, which is a very important upgrade if you are using Wayland, especially with Nvidia GPUs.

Just a guess. If I’m right, you have a few choices:

1. Upgrade to Ubuntu Studio 25.04 (non-LTS). It has newer stuff like Plasma 6 that fixes a LOT of problems like this.

2. Switch to X11 instead of Wayland. This will likely introduce a new set of problems though. X11 has no future.

3. Switch to a different DE than KDE. I am not sure what is best in this situation.

4. Install the latest Nvidia drivers manually instead of getting them from the Ubuntu repo.

Option 1 is by far the simplest choice.

The Linux desktop is in a big transitional phase these past few years, as more distros default to Wayland even before a lot of their packages are updated to fully support it. It’s a terrible time to be stuck with outdated “LTS” distros. This is why I hopped away from Debian 12 (13 is out now so yay, but it was a year too late for me).

The author pronounces it [aɡe̞] with a hard g, like GIF

LOL

And that e is the mid front unrounded vowel, of course.

I remember when some company started advertising “BURN-proof” CD-R drives and thinking that was a really dumb phrase, because literally nobody shortened “buffer underrun” to “BURN”, and because, you know, “burning” was the entire point of a CD-R drive.

It worked though. Buffer underruns weren’t a problem on the later generations of drives. I still never burned at max speed on those though. Felt like asking for trouble to burn a disc at 52x or whatever they maxed out at. At that point it was the difference between 1.5 minutes and 4 minutes or something like that. I was never in that big a rush.

It’s a real post on Reddit. I don’t know what combination of screenshotting/uploading tools leads to this kind of mangling, but I’ve seen it in screenshots from Android, too. The artifacts seem to run down in straight vertical lines, so maybe slight scaling with a nearest-neighbor algorithm (in 2025?!?) plus a couple levels of JPEG compression? It looks really weird.

I’m curious. If anyone knows, please enlighten me!

Neat!

If anyone else is curious, there’s a lengthy blog post with some photos here: https://www.aboomerslifeafter50.com/travel/is-the-amtrak-auto-train-worth-the-ride-heres-my-take-going-to-florida/

Two adult rail fares $286 + one roomette for two $565 + automobile $269 = Grand total $1120

And a Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto_Train

Season 10 (or 13 if you count wrong)

I can’t keep this straight anymore. Is this new season also basically half-a-season?

XMPP is still around! Despite Google’s best efforts to kill it.

Oh wow, they already have a 2.0 prerelease build. That was fast!

I’m in no rush. 1.x has been doing its job without demanding any of my attention since I set it up a year or so ago. Setup was a bit complex, but it was definitely worth learning.

Honestly, I’m amazed how long it’s taken Microsoft to run GitHub into the ground. But let’s be real: enshittification is inevitable. This is Microsoft we’re talking about.

The best time to migrate away from GitHub was 2018. The second-best time is today.

Or perhaps you do not understand how Discord is commonly used.

People join dozens of servers. Maybe one for every game they play, every TV show they watch, every podcast they listen to. Everything has a Discord.

Even small Discord servers have many channels. Bigger ones will have dozens or hundreds of channels.

Some servers have millions of users. Most of the servers I’m in have thousands.

Many channels are default for all users in the server.

Not sure what the mathematical average is, but this is certainly common at least, and any alternative that can’t handle this is no alternative at all.

If we’re talking about Matrix as a Discord alternative, then that would mean thousands of channels, each with hundreds or thousands of users, many with constant activity.

I’m not sure if anybody actually uses Matrix at the scale of the average Discord user. Sliding sync is supposed to help, but I don’t think the Matrix architecture can realistically scale that high.

I set up their accounts

Setup is the hardest part. Syncing multiple devices and device migration are also hard. I’ll bet you’re going to act as tech support every time they get a new phone. That’s fine for your family, but it’s hardly going to scale.

The performance issues show up when dealing with large groups syncing between instances. You might just not be using it that way, but that’s what needs to work seamlessly for a viable substitute for Discord.

Matrix is notorious for its poor performance with large/numerous groups. They keep claiming to improve it, but it’s still bad.

I mean, it’s great that it works for you, but be honest: isn’t your tolerance for technological friction a bit higher than the average bear’s? People complain that Mastodon is too hard, and Matrix is ten times worse to sign up for and use.

I hate to say it, but Matrix is never going to be mainstream. Its UX is bad and it seems like it’s too bloated to fix. If I tried to get people to move from Discord to Matrix, they’d never take me seriously again. It was hard enough getting people to move from Facebook Messenger to Signal.