I have Ubuntu 24.04.1 installed on my RPi 5. For the most part I’m quite happy with it. One lone exception is when I run apt to perform any package updates. It’s at that time I used to get the message “The following security updates require Ubuntu Pro with ‘esm-apps’ enabled:”, followed by a list of packages that won’t get the update. I don’t care, and I’m getting ready to remove those applications that require those libraries. In the mean time I wanted a way to turn off the annoying message.

To quiet that output, there is a file in the filesystem at /var/lib/ubuntu-advantage/apt-esm/etc/apt/sources.list.d named ubuntu-esm-apps.sources that you can edit with sudo vi (or whatever editor you prefer) to silence the blather. Here’s what the file looks like after the edit.

# Written by ubuntu-pro-client#Types: deb#URIs: https://esm.ubuntu.com/apps/ubuntu#Suites: noble-apps-security noble-apps-updates#Components: main#Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/ubuntu-pro-esm-apps.gpg

Note that every line has a # comment character at the beginning. Excluding line 1, which is a legitimate comment, that’s every line that follows. If I need to re-enable the messages, all I have to do it re-edit the file and remove the comment characters.

For reasons that are a total mystery to me, the latest update to Firefox on Ubuntu 24.04.1 on my RPi 5 has turned into a complete performance hog. That is, every action is dog slow, from opening a page on a website to just navigating between open tabs. After putting up with that behavior for just about a day I installed Chromium and have been using it ever since, such as to write these last two posts.

I wish I could continue to use Firefox, because Firefox could use all the support it can muster right about now, but I think I’ve just about had enough. I only installed Firefox out of habit and inertia; I seldom use it anywhere anymore, choosing either Vivaldi, Chrome, or on rare occasions Safari on my Macs. Firefox is withering away to nothing more than an anachronistic historical footnote. On this RPi 5 system I’ve already purged Firefox, as it makes no sense to keep two browsers if all I’m going to use is Chromium.