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What exactly need be "tuned" for virtualization in a VM? I start my VMs with ubuntu-minimal, which is pretty darned minimal indeed. I think "eject" is about the only package in there that a VM wouldn't want.

thats the base install? Hell my full Raspian install is smaller than that!

Ubuntu Core is 34MB.

Whats better ... if the submitter of the story had bothered to even google for it ... on the Ubuntu Core page ...

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Core

About half way done the page, under Deploying Ubuntu Core, it links to the documentation for an x86 VM running ubuntu core ...

It is true. The Ubuntu Tweak tool, and Gnome 3, along with whatever extension a user feels they need (like adding a restart button), works very well. Gnome 3 is an affordable, modern OS IMHO and I like it a lot. I have Ubuntu 12.04/Gnome 3 on all my PCs, from large double-monitor rigs to a 10" netbook display. And I am thrilled I don't have to reconfigure anything until October 2017 according to this chart:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LTS

Also, the low-tech folks with no budget who 'just needed a (recycled) computer' that I've turned on to it, have all taken to it well so far, with the most-minimal of hand-holding. So they are all good until October 2017 too. And I already know when to be ready for them, and when to get them ready too. October 2017 folks. Write it down.
__
https://extensions.gnome.org/
http://ubuntu-tweak.com/
----

Look, you keep blaming me for "religious zealotry", of which I have none. While it may appear otherwise to people who don't read what I write, I am not persuaded by Stallman's ethical argument, which is also his only argument. None of the reasons for using a free OS I gave you have anything to do with religion or ethics. They have to do with security, privacy, total cost of ownership, the ability to make the software to do what you want, the freedom to study the software itself, and the very nature of the scientific method. Why won't you address just this one thesis:

Non-free software should not be used in either science or science education because the methodology is secret, the correctness of results is unverifiable, and therefore no valid scientific results can ever be obtained with the non-trivial help from non-free software. To help you with non-trivial: a paper typed in MS Word may be scientific, but a histogram plotted from a data set processed in Mathematica is just voodoo.

Still, this article is talking about choosing Linux-based OS. I am curious to hear which distributions you deem to have "software vendor is spying on me, wasting my cycles on ads, and leaving the back door open" that got you so riled up?

Ubuntu is one of the worst offenders. They think it's OK to peddle non-free software. More than that: that's how they get paid. They are now openly spying on users by default. The fact that they are open about it does little to repair the damage it does to the users. If you know that FBI is legally filming your apartment windows 24/7 and has a tail on you wherever you go, your privacy is still invaded.

And if the search bar was not enough to convince me, Ubuntu also hosts Adobe Flash in its own repository and suggests it to its users. So they get paid for letting Adobe spy on your files, your computer use, and your Web browsing, and who knows what else, and for all we know Canonical itself spies through Flash by proxy (Adobe could as well give them an information cut). And what do you get for that abuse? A shitty Trisquel-like OS that is capable of running on unmaintainable hardware and showing low-res movies of a cat playing piano.

You link to FSF page that lists only nine distributions, which honestly are not very widely used.

This is irrelevant. Slackware, which is arguably one of the best distributions out there (from the engineering point of view), is not very widely used.

To recommend a newcomer starts from a more obscure, restrictive distribution is counter-productive

Trisquel is neither obscure nor restrictive. It's basically free Ubuntu. How can you even call free distributions restrictive? They are much easier to get help with, too, because every bug or behavior can be traced to the source code, and most of them have been by now. I know what you mean though: you seem to think that excluding non-free drivers and firmware is "restrictive". But that is nonsense. This is like saying that a car dealership free of lemons is "restrictive". Trisquel actually helps its users by cutting all of the buggy and sneaky proprietary crap.

In this particular case, where the OP is getting 3 to 4 year old desktops for free, this "restriction" does not exist in any form. All he needs to do is pick machines that are supported by a free kernel (given the age and the form factor, it's pretty much all of them). He will immediately see improvement in stability, if nothing else.

Don't be surprised how often the average Windows user is asked by "HelpDesk" to launch cmd and then run ipconfig /all, then ipconfig /flushdns and so on.

Whether Linux/Windows/OSX it's the same thing.

Hence my proposal: http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/29001/

Even advanced users might find use for it (since it allows you to use keyboard shortcuts to do under the hood stuff).

I have a MacBook Pro r3.1 and can walk into an Apple store and get support at the Genius Bar for it. I have Snow Leopard 10.6 on it, along with Ubuntu 12.04, and I can upgrade the OS to Mountain Lion if I wanted.

Which you might want, if you find that the answer you get at the Genius Bar is "OK, that's a bug we fixed in {10.7.x, 10.8.x}, that's about all the help we can offer". Yes, the Genius Bar may listen sympathetically to your problem report, but the advice they offer might be "you'll have to get a newer OS if you want that problem fixed".

And, no, this isn't different from some other OSes, and I'm quite aware of that, so "butbutbut Ubuntu!" or "butbutbut Windows!" is not a sensible riposte. However, if you want security updates for your OS version for a long period of time, you might get more of that with Windows, as Microsoft are offering "Mainstream Support" for Windows 8 until 2018, or an Ubuntu LTS release, as Canonical has April 2017 as the end-of-life date for 12.04.2 LTS. Ubuntu "STS", not so much, as the end-of-life date for 12.10 is April 2014 and the claim is that the end-of-life date for 13.04 will be October 2014. If Apple continue their every-year release strategy and their "software updates for the current release, security updates for the previous release" policy, you'll get security updates for two years for each release, which is more like the non-LTS versions of Ubuntu than the LTS releases or Windows.)

(Oh, and I'm a Mac user, and have used OS X to work on stuff such as this. Note, BTW, that, after those slides came out, we went with running a single automountd in a global session, but mounts are done by subprocesses that are, in various release-dependent ways, attached to the session that provoked the mount.)

away from you

Apple still offers PPC Mac and 10.2 downloads.

Then insist you should buy a new computer. OS X is like leasing a car vs. owning one.

I'm using Snow Leopard, 10.6 and if I don't want to I don't have to install Lion or Mountain Lion and I can still use my Mac. Ubuntu stops supporting 10.04 desktop in April, and 12.04 server in 2015. And 10.04 is a Long Term Support edition. Canonical increased LTS to 5 years now for both version starting with 12.04. That is shorter than Apple's, and Microsoft's support.

I think however that I bought my last PC (personal computer) and OS from Apple. I may buy another Macbook Pro but I'm not sure. I don't think so but I may also try to build a Hachintosh.

Falcon

Sorry for piggypacking on your post. It's the first sensible one, and this blog post by Canonical's Technical Architect (Client) should have been in TFS to provide a basis for discussion. Posting anon because I modded.

With luck there will eventually be a push for a standardized tablet platform that is open enough to permit users to select their own OS.

That standard platform is the Android kernel.

Meanwhile Plasma Active, Salifish, and Tizen are based on a traditional Linux platform, and the Mer project hopes to be the common core distribution for them.

For the tiny fraction of users who "select their own OS", device popularity and an unlocked bootloader matter far more than standardization. If you buy an unsuccessful phone, it won't have a community providing images for it and jailbreaking its bootloader if necessary.

The standardized platform is vital for all these also-ran OSes to get lots of apps. Aaron Seigo's post about standardizing the QML compontents across KDE Plasma, Jolla Sailfish, BlackBerry 10 and Ubuntu is a good sign, but they still suffer from inconsistent device APIs and different packaging requirements. That's where Firefox OS has a theoretical edge: apps for it are just web pages with a manifest. The number of web developers (incuding "app" developers who just put a wrapper around an HTML app) is orders of magnitude more than QML developers.

Most likely this will come from the second tier Chinese manufacturers who would benefit most from a common reference standard.

They don't push for anything. They ship Android.

It's all on their website.

Name one of those four that would do so using Ubuntu. IBM and HP both have their own solutions, and Dell is a RHEL reseller. That leaves you AT&T... would you like to call them or should I?

Name one? How about all four:

HP
IBM
Dell
AT&T (although AT&T don't mention it themselves, but their cloud does run on Ubuntu: "Ubuntu and OpenStack are also powering clouds at the likes of HP, AT&T, Rackspace and Dell.")

Name one of those four that would do so using Ubuntu. IBM and HP both have their own solutions, and Dell is a RHEL reseller. That leaves you AT&T... would you like to call them or should I?

Name one? How about all four:

HP
IBM
Dell
AT&T (although AT&T don't mention it themselves, but their cloud does run on Ubuntu: "Ubuntu and OpenStack are also powering clouds at the likes of HP, AT&T, Rackspace and Dell.")

Name one of those four that would do so using Ubuntu. IBM and HP both have their own solutions, and Dell is a RHEL reseller. That leaves you AT&T... would you like to call them or should I?

Name one? How about all four:

HP
IBM
Dell
AT&T (although AT&T don't mention it themselves, but their cloud does run on Ubuntu: "Ubuntu and OpenStack are also powering clouds at the likes of HP, AT&T, Rackspace and Dell.")

$ rvm
The program 'rvm' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing:
sudo apt-get install ruby-rvm

it doesn't seem like a package manager but more like ruby's own tool; Ruby Version Manager

http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/precise/man1/rvm.1.html

http://rvm.io/

Development of the Terminal application is underway and open to anybody who wants to contribute to it: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/CoreApps/Terminal

And yes, there is a lot that hasn't been implemented yet. This is a Developer Preview, meant to give app developers something to play with and deploy Ubuntu SDK apps on, and also to make the source code available to anybody who wants to hack on it (and we hope contribute those hacks back to us).

Thankfully the snooping is going to remain optional (although still opt-out rather than opt-in). I've still got it turned off on my desktop, but reading documents like this (specifically the Data and metrics passed to the Smart Scopes service section) are a little reassuring, in that you can see that the developers are thinking about how to take only the data they need and are trying to protect it. I particularly like their (far-off) plans for sending location information: they won't send your exact co-ordinates like Google or Apple does - they'll round them off to maybe a 10km square because that level of location accuracy is probably not needed for the search. There's also a friendlier summary of the spec available.

That said, while this kind of fuck up is still happening, I'm going to keep online search off, despite being tempted by functionality like its iView (Aussie Hulu) support.

I too hope that you don't need an Ubuntu One account to use the tablet...

BTW, he's not running Ubuntu on his servers, he's running Ubuntu Server, a different beast.

You seem Ubuntu Server not fit for servers, but it's beating out Redhat, so there's obviously a lot of people that disagree with you. http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1072

Ubuntu Server is a mostly well though-out environment. I like
Upstart. You get a distro with somewhat recent software (much more than RHell), more stable than Fedora, and depending on the Debian flavor, more stable or more recent or just plain "what everybody else is using". The latter means you've got a lot to google from when you hit a problem or need some help.

Also, there's a lot of cloud support. Check out https://juju.ubuntu.com/

BTW, he's not running Ubuntu on his servers, he's running Ubuntu Server, a different beast.

You seem Ubuntu Server not fit for servers, but it's beating out Redhat, so there's obviously a lot of people that disagree with you. http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1072

Ubuntu Server is a mostly well though-out environment. I like
Upstart. You get a distro with somewhat recent software (much more than RHell), more stable than Fedora, and depending on the Debian flavor, more stable or more recent or just plain "what everybody else is using". The latter means you've got a lot to google from when you hit a problem or need some help.

Also, there's a lot of cloud support. Check out https://juju.ubuntu.com/

Sounds good to me. Grab the code and run with it https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Brainstorm#The_Brainstorm_Open_Source_project

Also the dating service for geeks and ideas could work nicely!

Make sure to announce it with a big splash so we all will find it.

iptables can be fantastically complex and powerful to protect enterprise networks from all manner of attack. It is also fast and easy to do a simple, basic, strong setup which will provide a powerful firewall to secure a server.

Some useful iptables tutorials and references:

1) From CentOS, but iptables runs the same way regardless of OS. This one creates a pretty solid simple iptables ruleset to protect a server.

2) An Ubuntu tutorial, again simple and informative.

3) From the netfilter/iptables project homepage. Good primer on network concepts too.

4) Deeper information, but very useful. Another good discussion of network concepts.

I recommend typing in a simple text file with the iptables commands, the chmod'ing it so that it is executable. Then execute it ("./myrules"). This works for a small, but powerful list of rules that can protect a server. Some of the tutorials talk of rulesets with thousands of lines. There are different, more efficient ways to load those.

Quick overview of iptables:
1) There are three default chains (containers which sets of rules) called INPUT, FORWARD and OUTPUT.

2) Each of these can have a default policy of ACCEPT or DROP. Input should have a default policy of drop. IMPORTANT - while you're first playing with iptables, make sure input has a default policy of Accept ("iptables -P INPUT ACCEPT") or you may well lock yourself out of your machine. Once you've got the rules set up as you'd like (you view the rules with "iptables -L -v"), then you can do "iptables -P INPUT DROP".

3) Always set these three "housekeeping" or basic rules (prefacing with a '#' is a comment):

# For the loopback interface 127.0.0.1, accept everything. Append to input chain.
iptables -A INPUT -i lo -j ACCEPT
# For ICMP packets, accept pings only
iptables -A INPUT -p ICMP --icmp-type echo-request -j ACCEPT
# For established connections, accept everything, using the older state module
iptables -A INPUT -m state --state RELATED,ESTABLISHED -j ACCEPT

4) Your input chain, which deals with incoming packets, will have a default policy of drop. Only ports which are then specifically allowed will be open:

# Accept SSH on port 22
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 22 -j ACCEPT
# Accept HTTP on port 80
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT
# Accept HTTPS on port 443
iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 443 -j ACCEPT

5) You're not using your box as a router, so your FORWARD chain should not get any activity. I leave the policy as Accept, so if there is any traffic logged here, I know something unusual is going on:

# Otherwise, accept all for FORWARD
iptables -P FORWARD ACCEPT

6) Finally your output chain should just allow everything:

# Accept everything:
iptables -P OUTPUT ACCEPT

7) Check your iptables ruleset with "iptables -L -v". If everything looks good, set your default input policy to drop with "iptables -P INPUT DROP"

And that is a spiffy, powerful way to block all ports but 22 (ssh), 80 (http) and 443 (https) by using iptables.

Well, has Ubuntu for Android been release to the general public in binary form? It does not look like it, and as far as I can tell they will release the source when they release the binaries.

To make life even easier, there's also:
http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/

Make sure you pick a Windows laptop from that list, and you're guaranteed that it will work with Ubuntu (which, admittedly, is not a guarantee that it'll work with Debian, but it should be near as damnit considering the shared resources). No horrible WiFi driver nightmares for you.

http://flavio.tordini.org/minitube

Linux, Mac OS X, Windows

"Light on your computer. By consuming less CPU, Minitube preserves battery life and keeps your laptop cool. That's because Minitube does not use the Flash Player.

High Definition. Minitube plays HD videos up to 1080p. Go full-screen and watch them play smoothly.

1-Click Downloads. Download your favorite clips to your computer and put them on your portable device. Downloaded files are in MPEG4 format which is compatible with most devices, including Apple ones.

Stop fiddling. Just search for something. Minitube automatically plays videos one after another. Sit back and enjoy."

http://packages.ubuntu.com/quantal/minitube
http://packages.debian.org/sid/minitube

Or check out this site: http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop .

Uh. . .I'd be careful with this. I've been using Ubuntu exclusively for years and have had no serious problems UNTIL I tried to log into the online portion of a course via McGraw Hill Connect. The log in screen bounced me out for no other reason than because I was using Linux. The ironic part is when I found a way in that bypassed the courses official log-in screen, the online portions ran just fine.

Or check out this site: http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop .

So you have either malware or a virus infecting your computer that you cannot get rid of, but we are to believe you have the technical prowess to hack this website.

The fix you are looking for is here http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop

Good luck with your hacking there dummy.

No, this kid doesn't need a desktop OS, he is clearly in the mobile generation.

So you have either malware or a virus infecting your computer that you cannot get rid of, but we are to believe you have the technical prowess to hack this website.

The fix you are looking for is here http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop

Good luck with your hacking there dummy.

As it is impossible to sell a computer without Windows outside of a very small niche - most users don't even know what an OS is - that gives Microsoft such bargaining power that when they demand, OEMs have no choice but to comply.

That is completely false, see Apple, System76, Dell, Zareason and others. That is a pretty sizeable 'niche', but of course Microsoft have that much control because end users want Microsoft's product and those OEMs are invested in building products for them and (outside of Apple) those vendors of the alternative operating systems - and their supporters - spend all their time focussed on what Microsoft is doing and whinging about it rather than producing a product that people actually *want* to use. The only thing stopping Linux adoption is Linux and its community, just look at what happened when a competent company with a focus on the user took Linux and made it palatable for the masses - they squashed Microsoft and RIM in the smartphone market! Desktop Linux distros are built by developers for developers, that's why the vast majority of non-developers don't use them.

how can JB not support your hardware?!? oh, because it's not using drivers written for linux, it's stuff written for dalvik.

So how do you think Ubuntu mobile runs on phones if the drivers were written for Dalvik? Especially given that Ubuntu uses the same drivers as Android. You seem very confused about what drivers and/or Dalvik are, Dalvik is a Virtual Machine, drivers do not run in Dalvik.

Option 1. (if your software is linux-native or runs stable under wine, needs no fancy gfx)
xrdp + wine - a remote desktop solution, integrates well, authenticates well
rdesktop can haz a seamless mode, preferred corporate solution
can be tunneled via ssh or vpn to add security
ubuntuwiki/xrdp

Option 2. (if your software is linux-native or runs stable under wine, needs no fancy gfx)
ssh -X remotemachine "wine remoteapp"
to integrate: ActiveDirectoryAuthentication

Option 3. (if your app only runs only on windows, you live in a reverse engineering friendly country)
(was?) LEGAL only in some countrys i.e. germany, sweden, ...
have a (possibly virtualized) xp/win7 box running your apps, modded with:
a. Seamless RDP hack (xp only afaik)
- SeamlessRDP
- Ubuntu/SeamlessVirtualization
b. Enable Multiple Concurrent RDP Connections
a bit hacky but it works, rly :> I've done this in small corporate environments, but usually in such situations you either have to choose between investing in making your apps run under wine, or pay m$ or a commercial opponent for their work.

Finally you could have a look at TinyCore as a nice toolbox to mend it all together.

anx XMPP ulzq de

Option 1. (if your software is linux-native or runs stable under wine, needs no fancy gfx)
xrdp + wine - a remote desktop solution, integrates well, authenticates well
rdesktop can haz a seamless mode, preferred corporate solution
can be tunneled via ssh or vpn to add security
ubuntuwiki/xrdp

Option 2. (if your software is linux-native or runs stable under wine, needs no fancy gfx)
ssh -X remotemachine "wine remoteapp"
to integrate: ActiveDirectoryAuthentication

Option 3. (if your app only runs only on windows, you live in a reverse engineering friendly country)
(was?) LEGAL only in some countrys i.e. germany, sweden, ...
have a (possibly virtualized) xp/win7 box running your apps, modded with:
a. Seamless RDP hack (xp only afaik)
- SeamlessRDP
- Ubuntu/SeamlessVirtualization
b. Enable Multiple Concurrent RDP Connections
a bit hacky but it works, rly :> I've done this in small corporate environments, but usually in such situations you either have to choose between investing in making your apps run under wine, or pay m$ or a commercial opponent for their work.

Finally you could have a look at TinyCore as a nice toolbox to mend it all together.

anx XMPP ulzq de

Have you looked at these solutions? https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SeamlessVirtualization

I'd prefer something like this: http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/29001/

Note: it doesn't have to be just for phone support - it can be used by power users to do "under the hood" stuff really fast- set a static IP address, DNS, or go back to DHCP from having a static IP.

Kubuntu is no longer official, and the KDE packages have been moved from main to the universe repository. http://packages.ubuntu.com/quantal/kde/

This is why I switched to Debian. Might as well get the packages straight from their source.

For something that's more completely considered a bug, check the long and sorry history of bug 108951. Only about 6 years old, but one of the more irritating ones. Sad to see such an issue bounced from distro to project to DE and back again, then finally closed because the feature it affects is removed.

So. please don't mutter /. Thanks.

There now. FTFY

Don't mind me, I'll let you get back to designing that infinity drive powered fusion anti-matter sparko-manoflap thing. Or whatever "important" stuff you and you're computer happen to be doing.

Unity on the lowend is laughable. Clicking the search button is nearly as much of a kiss of death as the old keyboards with standby buttons on Win98.

That I can pretty much agree with. They have some minimum requirements but 700 MHz seems a little low to me. Anything under my purview ranking lower than about a 2 GHz P4 gets the Openbox treatment.

Ubuntu was demoing an Android port at CES this year, which sounds as though it runs in something like a chroot jail. The idea seems to be to hook your phone up to a monitor to display Linux apps, but it seems at least conceivable that they could display on the phone's screen if you could get around the usability issues.

Install Android, and install Ubuntu's user space in a chroot. Connecting the machine to HDMI would display a prompt to start the X11 session, just as connecting an Android 2.x device to a PC used to display a prompt to mount the internal storage.

'The bad guys are getting worse,' says Howard. 'Antivirus helps filter down the problem, but the next big security company will be the one that offers a comprehensive solution.'"

Run your OS off a read-only USB device ... link

"Australian company Cybersource says it's currently talking to two domestic banks about providing Linux-based bootable CDs to consumers to ensure Internet banking security". link

"Accessing online banking from your home PC is unsafe, says CIO of CNL Bank", link link

TFA alludes to the idea that your phone becomes a full blown PC when you dock it. OK, so Ubuntu doesn't have a good track record with UI, and there is no reason to believe that this phone UI is any better than what they've done to the Linux desktop. But the idea of my phone being my computer is very appealing to me. I dock my phone at the office, and immediately get to use a full display, keyboard, mouse/trackpad, etc. Same thing when I take it home. It's a real Linux OS, with a CLI and everything if I want it. That is very appealing to me.

I definitely don't want this if the OS is owned by the cellular carrier. I want to install my own OS on a commodity phone, and I'm the root user on the system, not Sprint or Verizon or AT&T.

The thing about sprouting the Unity GUI für PC when an external monitor is connected was announced a year ago or so. Explained at http://www.ubuntu.com/devices/android at the time of writing

If you want Amazon search to be "seemless" (a word which I wouldn't think even belongs for a tack on UI element like this), you just remove the "a" prefix. There could be a better UI to this concept; the important advance is that there's a UI to limit it at all, while still being useful.

If you don't like the intermediary, it's stated to be "about 5 lines of code" to build your own. The only interesting part is that it needs an Amazon services ID to unlock the search API of their site. If you have your own Amazon services capable account instead, you can host it. If you don't, this guy is offering the connector to make things easier for you, specifically disclaimed with how he'll benefit from that.

A bit evil out of the box, accurately described as being so, and with easy workarounds to the biggest concerns. That solves this problem as well as I'd like to be. As for what we know about the service hosting so far, it's the personal site of someone who works at a Canonical partner. It looks to me like he's trying to get someone else to pick up the intermediary role by providing an example.

It really bothers me that everyone here is propping up all these new proprietary system for something like a backup solution whenever there are so many open alternatives.

Almost anything is better than buying some black box solution that will sure to be outdated and out of the users control in a year.

Ubuntu has a few pages which outline supported hardware and certified computers.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardwareSupport

Canonical only certifies hardware that's sent by vendors and they usually send complete systems. There is a tab above called Component Catalog http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/catalog/ it does not have complete motherboards tough but discrete components.

http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/ shows desktops and servers classified by vendor, distro, etc

I'm not terribly sure what you mean by that. The moronic scrollbars are the only thing I know of, and that's even a separate package (which if you uninstall, or never install in the first place, you'll get the normal GTK+ scrollbar). What does Canonical do to GTK+ 3 that affects it outside of Unity?

I don't like Starter Linux any more than the rest of the bearded ones here, but if you are having trouble hibernating/sleeping in Linux, try running up their live CD and see if it works out of the box on there.
You might find that more systems do support it than you thought.

"Configuration files residing in ~ are not usually affected by this command."
Source

So you're right for the most part. Since these truly are config files (and files that take up ~1GB), I think Steam should purge them when I use the purge command (for remove, it should keep them). For instance, these files aren't equivalent to the files in ~/.wine. The files equivalent to that would be ~/.steam, ~/.steampath, and ~/.steampid. I would compare ~/.local/share/Steam with /etc/myprogram.

I wouldn't complain if it didn't take up so much data, and this was a machine with not much space, so I wanted to completely wipe it. I just wanted to test Steam on it.

Apart from the fact that Windows 8 is a crap product to start with that also actively tramples on our privacy and forces unwanted ads on the user

How does Windows 8 trample privacy and force ads on the user? Any features that report data back to Microsoft can be turned off at install time, and all data they send is non identifiable, and not used for advertising purposes, and is clearly spelled out in the privacy policy, which is also available to read offline during install. Further, and ads in the OS are part of free apps that can be installed and are completely nonessential.

You want to talk about ads and privacy, look no further than Ubuntu and Amazon spyware, which integrates both ads and privacy invasion directly into core OS components right on the desktop. Yes, this can also be turned off, but I think that's a little more offensive than ads in nonessential content-driven apps and games, because A) it's not available to disable at install time. At no time does Ubuntu spell out what's it's doing with your data and present a clear concise policy on the data they collect. And B) not only is amazon getting your data, but potentially the other 24 sources listed here. And what's worse, each entity has their own policy on data they collect; Ubuntu sends out your personal search data, and washes their hands of the situation. So if you want to know how these companies are handling you data, be prepared to read upwards of 20 privacy statements.

First fix the privacy mess on your own turf. Then you can come and complain about Microsoft.