I haven’t got a substack account, or I would have subscribed, but I hope you keep writing. You’ve given me a lot to think about. While I don’t quite know what to do with these questions yet, or if there is even something I can do about them, they’re salient and framed extremely well.

It’s a wonder people haven’t started throwing water balloons filled with mud and flour at the cameras. Perhaps he should be grateful that’s not a trend?

I took a brief look at one and it seems they may have learnt their lesson from the first time around, unfortunately.

Nah, it’s 24.04 LTS

1. Ubuntu memory allocation and limits (I think). I haven’t dug too much into finding the root cause, but I have a recurring issue where the GUI freezes up, and it looks like it might be related to not handling well how much memory it needs for the task.

Maybe it thinks it has more memory available than it does, or the gc isn’t running efficiently, or it’s allocating to 100% without including a sensible safety gap, something like that. It’s a significantly low-level enough problem that I’m wary of tinkering with values I don’t fully understand even if I wanted to spend the probably large amount of time necessary to find root cause.

2. The fact Ubuntu now withholds package updates unless you’re paying for their “maintenance and compliance subscription”, but that’s probably on me to change distros. I get that Ubuntu employees need money so they can eat, just like I do, but … The idea of paying for core package updates feels like a nightmare waiting to happen, for both Ubuntu developers managing package dependencies and end-user experience.