We have always strived to give our users the best support options. After asking the community via a thread on Ubuntu Discourse and being given positive feedback, we have decided to move our primary support channel from Ask Ubuntu to Ubuntu Discourse.
Ask Ubuntu, which was run outside of the Ubuntu Governance, was a great idea in its time, but as time has gone on, it has become difficult for the moderators to moderate as its host, StackExchange, has made questionable decisions, including shutting-down OpenSSO, which effectively disabled many accounts which were exclusively linked to Launchpad without recovery. StackExchange has been uncooperative with re-enabling this link to Launchpad, leaving many users, who had higher privileges due to their participation, having to start over.
Additionally, as stated long before, the Ubuntu Forums section for Ubuntu Studio has long been dead. Additionally, the Ubuntu Forums, which is officially under the Ubuntu Governance, have found themselves in a position where the software Ubuntu Forum is unable to upgrade any further. As a result, on Thursday, January 9, 2025, they have officially shut-down. Over the two months prior, support has transitioned to Ubuntu Discourse with much success.
As such, with the community feedback, Ubuntu Studio’s primary support will be changing to Ubuntu Discourse. The support links will be changing over in the menu for all supported versions of Ubuntu Studio (as of this writing, 22.04 LTS, 24.04 LTS, and 24.10), and the Ask Ubuntu section on the website will change to Ubuntu Discourse.
Special Non-Support/Help Community Section
A new icon appearing in the Ubuntu Studio Information menu is “Connect with Community”. This will take you to the special Ubuntu Studio section of the Ubuntu Discourse where, while support and help questions aren’t allowed, other discussions are. This is also where you will find future release notes along with the newest LTS Backports Megathread for any application backport requests you may have.
Overall, this will be a great place to connect with other members of the community and interact with developers.
Small update on 22.04 LTS to 24.04 LTS upgrades
It has been confirmed that a “quirk” needs to be added to ubuntu-release-upgrader that forces an installation of pipewire-audio during the upgrade calculation. A member of the team that works on this has taken this on and is working on a fix. Please stay tuned for further updates.