The Dropped Connection
To maximize battery life on laptops, Ubuntu aggressively utilizes a feature called “USB Auto-Suspend.” If the operating system detects that a plugged-in USB device (like a mouse, a webcam, or an external hard drive) hasn’t sent or received data in a few seconds, it cuts the power to that specific USB port to save energy. While this works well for simple devices, it causes massive stability issues for high-draw peripherals. If you are using a USB Wi-Fi dongle, an external audio interface, or a specialized gaming mouse, the auto-suspend feature might prematurely cut power, causing your network to drop or your mouse to freeze for a second before waking back up.
Forcing Continuous Power
To ensure your peripherals remain stable and stop Ubuntu from automatically suspending USB devices to save power, you must disable the USB auto-suspend feature globally via the boot loader.
The most permanent way to fix this across all devices is to edit the GRUB configuration. Open your terminal by pressing Ctrl+Alt+T. Type sudo nano /etc/default/grub and press Enter (provide your password). Look for the line that starts with GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=. Carefully move your cursor inside the quotation marks at the end of that line, add a space, and append the following flag exactly: usbcore.autosuspend=-1. (It should look something like GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash usbcore.autosuspend=-1"). Press Ctrl+O then Enter to save, and Ctrl+X to exit. Finally, you must apply the change by typing sudo update-grub and pressing Enter. Reboot your computer. Your USB ports will now deliver continuous, uninterrupted power.