JoeCoT

It depends on how many versions I am away from the latest, and how much I’ve messed with the distro.

Usually I stay on an Ubuntu LTS and upgrade from LTS to LTS when that upgrade path is ready. I upgraded from 20.04 to 22.04 this way.

But this time I wanted Pipewire in 24.04, and didn’t want to wait for a 22.04 to 24.04 upgrade to be ready. I’m using a bluetooth headset and Pulseaudio is pretty terrible at switching headset profiles. Between not wanting to upgrade an upgraded install, and having messed with Pulseaudio quite a bit trying to get it working, I went ahead and clean installed 24.04 and moved some configs over.

The best explanation I’ve seen is that music is mixed differently for CD/streaming and vinyl.

For mass market, the move has been to mix for louder bass and similar things. The idea being that it makes the music more popular. But it also makes it difficult to appreciate anything but the bass.

On vinyl, you can’t max out bass like that, it won’t work on the format. So they have to give it a normal mix instead, making it sound better. In theory CDs should sound better than vinyl, but because of the music production trends, it doesn’t currently.

They don’t have to force them to make an app. Instead they could make them provide an interface that an app can use. Instead of their current strategy of thwarting any attempt to make their ecosystem interoperable with competitor’s devices. I imagine them instantly killing Beeper’s connection to iMessage was a part of this move.

The fact that reddit cares is mostly used for harassment told me all I needed to know about how they’re handling their community.

A lot of Google/Android TV devices support “Basic TV” mode. You get the option during device setup, you can switch to it later by resetting the device. I would probably also not connect it to the internet, but that should cover making it a dumb device. I bought a Hisense one, tried it with Android TV for a bit, experienced it slow down and freeze up a bunch, and just switched it to Basic TV and plugged in a chromecast. Has worked fine since then.