[jiggy2011]

Yes, I've been down that route with setting things in network manager config and had them wiped out when doing Ubuntu updates.

The real problem here is that if you set multiple static IPs in NM GUI it will lie to you and tell you that it has done it when it hasn't. This is pretty dire UX.

The audio issues with spotify were from running the native Linux client, oddly the volume control in the Windows/Wine version works fine with alsa (although a recent update to spotify seems to have broken wine compatibility almost entirely).