Users like you are far more expensive for Apple in terms of tech support than some idiot who just wants a cool laptop. It was a strategy decision to drop professional application development.

Not Lazlow’s fault. You see, back then periodicals actually had sub-editors.

That’s not really what ESM updates are. There are the main and universe archives. The former are the core packages most Ubuntu installs are likely to want, while the latter are the many third-party packages Ubuntu offers easy access to. ESM is Canonical backporting security updates for those third-party packages to be compatible with the versions in each release’s universe archive, for 10 years - long after those third party devs have stopped supporting that Ubuntu release.

So ESM matters if you are sticking with an ageing distro for compatibility reasons, but not if you’re a normal user who will upgrade to the next LTS release on schedule, or if you’re accessing more recent versions of those packages via other methods.

In addition, ESM is free for personal use on up to 5 devices.

It’s an extra layer of support above and beyond that offered by the package maintainers, not withholding stuff for paid users.

This sounds very much like a swapfile issue. Check you have swap enabled and it is big enough for your needs.

If the swapfile is filled, the OS will lock up and advance very slowly. You can monitor swap in top or whatever you prefer.

Good news is this is trivial to fix.

If your system keeps losing time that may point to the need to replace the CMOS battery, but its rare for a mobo to be in use long enough to need that.

Amazon sell these devices at a loss to drive usage of their platform. They would prefer people using them to sideload would fuck off.

That’s just for Vega OS devices, which will be the low end ones.

The Select is even more locked down, it uses Vega OS which doesn’t permit any sideloading at all. The only apps are HTML5

I dunno who bothers to file bug reports with them. They’ll gaslight then get bitchy if that doesn’t work, and only then will they admit under sufferance that there may well be a flaw in their beautiful sexy code.

Yeppers