The Road to 24.10

We have quite a few exciting changes going on for Ubuntu Studio 24.10, including one that some might find controversial. However, this is not without a lot of thought and foresight, and even research, testing, and coordination.

With that, let’s just dive right into the controversial change.

Switching to Ubuntu’s Generic Kernel

This is the one that’s going to come as a shock. However, with the release of 24.04 LTS, the generic kernel is now fully capable of preemptable low latency workloads. Because of this, the lowlatency kernel in Ubuntu will eventually be depricated.

Rather than take a reactive approach to this, we at Ubuntu Studio decided to be proactive and switch to the generic kernel starting with 24.10. To facilitate this, we will be enabling not only threadirqs like we had done before, but also preempt=full by default.

If you had read the first link above, you’ll also notice that nohz_full=all was also recommended, but we noticed that created performance degradation in high video workloads, so we decided to leave that off by default but give users a GUI option in Ubuntu Studio Audio Configuration to enable and disable these three kernel parameters as they need.

This has been tested on 24.04 LTS with results equivalent to or better than with the lowlatency kernel. The Ubuntu Kernel Team also has mentioned even more improvements coming to the kernel in 24.10, including the potential of ability to change these settings and more on-the-fly without reboot.

There have also been numerous improvements for gaming with these settings, for those of you that like to game. You can explore more of that on the Ubuntu Discourse.

Plasma 6

We are in cooperation with the Kubuntu team doing what we can to help with the transition to KDE Plasma Desktop 6. The work is going along slowly but surely, and we hope to have more information on this in the future. For right now, most testing on new stuff is being done on Ubuntu Studio 24.04 LTS for this reason since desktop environment breakages can be catastrophic for application testing. Hence, any screenshots will be on Plasma 5.

New Theming for Ubuntu Studio

We’ve been using the Materia theme for the past five years, since 19.04, with a brief break for 22.04 LTS. Unfortunately, that is coming to an end as the Materia theme is no longer maintained. Its successor has been found in Orchis, which was forked from Materia. Here’s a general screenshot our Project Leader, Erich Eickmeyer, made from his personal desktop using Ubuntu Studio 24.04 LTS and the Orchis theme:

Contributions Needed, and Help a Family in Need!

Ubuntu Studio is a community-run project, and donations are always welcome. If you find Ubuntu Studio useful and want to support its ongoing development, please contribute!

Erich’s wife, Edubuntu Project Leader Amy Eickmeyer, lost her full-time job two weeks ago and the family is in desperate need of help in this time of hardship. If you could find it in your heart to donate extra to Ubuntu Studio, those funds will help the Eickmeyer family at this time.

Contribution options are on the sidebar to the right or at ubuntustudio.org/contribute.