I don’t use the Xbox app, but more client support is always good!

KDE Connect is great, but the simplest solution would be to just pair your phone and laptop via Bluetooth. Your phone will just treat your PC as a Bluetooth headset.

Not 100% sure with Ubuntu, but I do this on EndeavourOS and it just worked without any tinkering.

That sucks. I know what it’s like to feel like the only voice of reason when your company is shooting itself in the foot.

I see from other comments you’re already looking for a new job, which is a very good idea. From your description of this buyout, it seems very likely that you’re about 6 months to a year out from the layoff stage of the private equity playbook.

At the end of the day you’ll always have the experience you gained from building all that stuff. Perhaps you’ll get a chance to build it back even better somewhere else!

You can never be 100% sure, but there are protective factors that make it less likely, and they mostly boil down to incentive structure:

• Ownership - Is the project run by a non-profit? A for-profit company? A hobbyist? This is the best indicator of a project’s long-term trajectory, because it generally indicates the purpose behind creating it.
• Business model - How does the project make money? Donations? Subscription? One time payment? Generally models where you can outright purchase a copy of a particular version is insulated against future updates you don’t like. Donations protect against exploitation, but run the risk of the project being unsustainable and abandoned.
• Source - Open source code isn’t a silver bullet, but (especially with good licensing) it can make enshittification less likely as it’s a lot easier for dissenters to spin up a fork / competitor. It also makes it very difficult to hide sketchy stuff like data collection and back doors.
• Red flags - You should avoid anything that is SaaS, backed by an investment firm, or publicly traded. All of these involve incentive structures that encourage and reward exploitation of consumers and employees for increasing profit margins.

It’s way easier to move from one Linux distro to another if Valve starts enshittifying SteamOS (which would really suck) than it is to move from Windows to Linux. Either way this is a good stepping stone that’s well supported.

Think Different Freely.

When you install Windows, you don’t really control your computer. Microsoft does.