Ubuntu Will Now Have Amazon Ads Pre-Installed

An anonymous reader writes "Scheduled to be released next month, Ubuntu 12.10 now includes both Amazon ads in the user's dash and by default an Amazon store in the user's launcher. The reason for these 'features'? Affiliate revenue. Despite previous controversies with Banshee and Yahoo, Canonical is 'confident it will be an interesting and useful feature for our 12.10 users.' But are the 'users' becoming products?" Update: 09/22 19:35 GMT by T : Reader bkerensa scoffs, calling the Amazon integration unobtrusive, and says objections to its inclusion in the OS should be ignored, "because in reality ads will not be found in 12.10 unless you are seeing them on a third party website you go to in a web browser." He's got screenshots.

Comments

I see

[Anonymous Coward]

Mass migration in 3...2...1...

Re:I see

[rubycodez]

you mean the second one, of those people remaining after the Unity / GNOME3 rendered any concept of multi-task workflow useless

stick a fork in Canonical, they are done

Re:I see

[slashdyke]

That was my initial thought. So, since I am using 12.04 LTS, I am hoping that I can avoid the Amazon ads for a while. It will give me a chance to see (hopefully) Canonical remove the Ads in favour of the way it has been, or a chance to find a new distro to switch to. I suppose if there was an easy off switch, that might work, but I do so hate the concept in general.

Re:I see

[slashdyke]

Unity - I hate it. Pulled it off my system. Ubuntu with Gnome 2 is ok.

Re:I see

[udachny]

WTF does "right" have to do with claiming that adverts are "for your benefit"?

Do you consider FB, Zynga works of the "left" or the "right"? How about Google? How about Microsoft? How about Red Hat?

You are pushing political agenda into the world of software, so you have to define then what it means for software to be 'right' or 'left', these monikers don't have much meaning outside of software, but in software they are completely nonsensical.

Or is the meaning of "left leaning software" to be software designed and developed by the hungry?

---

I am not for or against ads by Canonical, it's their business, you can still download the source if you want to disable the ads I am sure, otherwise it's GPL violation.

Re:I see

[Gordonjcp]

after the Unity / GNOME3 rendered any concept of multi-task workflow useless

What's "useless" about it? It works just fine here...

Re:I see

[couchslug]

I'll just block the adverts.

Re:I see

[interkin3tic]

Is there any reason for people to upgrade? I know that a fast update schedule is a feature of ubuntu, but I've never understood why that's a positive thing.

Re:I see

[wvmarle]

I'm going to migrate, for sure. And this is definitely making it more so.

I've not migrated. I'm lazy. I know I should check out Mint, haven't done so. The Gnome Classic UI from Ubuntu 12.04 sucks badly: disappearing window borders, amongst many other irritations and bugs, so I'm already refusing to upgrade. My office is on 10.04 LTS, bugging me all the time for new LTS, not going to happen. I like 10.04, I really do, and am sad to see it go. That is one distro that Just Works. For me, at least. After I fought badly with it getting users to authenticate against Kerberos what Mandriva did out of the box. Unfortunately Mandriva is too much of a zombie business to use.

I understand the need of revenue, Red Hat does too, and is pretty profitable now, while they still have their free distro, Fedora. Without intrusive ads.

I have no problem with pre-installed stuff, preferably removable (Android violates that idea - can't even hide the Google Maps and Facebook apps on my phone, to name a few, but at least they're not in the way). If I happen to like Amazon I may actually use it. Like Firefox setting Google as default search engine, and getting a cut for doing so. I can choose Bing if I wanted to, make that default, and forget about Google. Amazon was there too.

But no ads, please. And a decent, well working UI. No everything-fullscreen shit. No huge icons for applications; a nicely arranged start menu and top bar with some shortcuts to often used stuff is just fine. Those things both Gnome and Ubuntu messed up. Too bad, it was nice working with it.

Re:I see

[couchslug]

I don't run Unity nor will I tolerate adverts, but I'll still run Ubuntu as long as it serves MY needs. Let someone else's eyeballs pay the bills.

Funny how so many responses are of the "switch distro" variety instead of "change settings".

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/03/gnome-classic-in-ubuntu-12-04-its-like-nothing-ever-changed

Re:I see

[wvmarle]

They may have fixed it, but my experience was so terrifying (in 11.04 or 11.10, I forgot, when it was first introduced) I'm not going to try the latest version. Here my key complaints:

- everything runs full-screen. That sucks. No drag and drop between windows, without first un-maximising them.

- after you close an application in a not-maximised window, it will relaunch maximised. I un-maximised it not just because!

- the above works when the not maximised window is - the "start" menu sucks. A few "favourite" applications, the rest you have to search for. A HUGE screen area taken for each application; scrolling galore as I don't have a 25" monitor. Or you have to start typing the name of the application to narrow down your search. Big suck. A well arranged menu searches quicker, takes little space, and no need to remove my hand from the mouse.

- crtl-tab window switching did not work. I had to dig deep first online then on my machine to get that basic switcher working. It took me seconds from installing Unity to find that out, all in all about half an hour (!) to fix that. And it still didn't work really well. Now that was a total show-stopper, if I had never before tried Ubuntu I'd have dropped it there and then, and not bothered to find out how to get it working.

Then in the process I found out that there is a "Gnome Classic" too, switched to that, and didn't look back. When upgrading Ubuntu I'm just selecting Gnome Classic and not even trying anything else. It's just that in 12.04 Gnome Classic sucks too, just not sucky enough to go through downloading and installing a whole new distro which sucks too. I'm first and foremost a user of my computer, after all!

Re:I see

[couchslug]

Why should you see any adverts?

Block or disable them. End of story.

Re:I see

[AliasMarlowe]

Unity - I hate it. Pulled it off my system. Ubuntu with Gnome 2 is ok.

I tried Unity in several iterations using VMs to test Ubuntu 11.10 and 12.04 on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. The result was depressing - all workflow was affected, and never positively. The new and allegedly "improved" features of Unity were regressive at best, and led to more clicks and more mouse movements to do the same stuff compared to Gnome 2. I briefly tried Gnome 3, but it was disastrous on multiple monitor systems.

Testing a VM with Xubuntu led to the least disruption to our workflow. So I then migrated all three of our home systems to Xubuntu 10.04 before upgrading them to Xubuntu 12.04 LTS. When I got a new laptop for my older daughter, it also got Xubuntu 12.04 LTS. Xfce is about as close to Gnome 2 as we could get.

We might migrate to Mate or Cinnamon or similar after they settle down a little. I'll also reassess Gnome 3 after another couple of minor versions, in case it actually improves enough to be tolerable. Otherwise, we'll either stay with xfce or move to KDE.

Re:I see

[realityimpaired]

Not that I'm a hater or anything, but if you're going to go with Gnome 2 on Ubuntu, why not switch to a distro where it's officially supported? Mint has an official MATE roll, which is a Gnome2 fork that showed up specifically because of the whole Gnome3/Unity fiasco. And... because Mint was originally a Ubuntu derivative, it will be familiar enough in terms of package management that there should be effectively zero learning curve.

And no, I'm not trying to evangelize for Mint... I use a different distro entirely. But if your criteria are wanting a Gnome2-based distro with apt repositories, then Mint/MATE should be a pretty good choice.

Re:I see

[couchslug]

So try different window managers.

Switching distros to change window managers is like scrapping your car instead of changing the oil!

Blocking adverts is trivial. Hosts file, anyone?

Re:I see

[jlbprof]

The concept is simple, both Unity and Gnome Shell say do it our way or hit the highway. We hit the highway. One size does not fit all, nor does one desktop pattern fit all work flows. If your workflow is simple, then Unity is great for you. But those of use that need more flexibility we have to move on.

Re:I see

[mcgrew]

you mean the second one, of those people remaining after the Unity / GNOME3 rendered any concept of multi-task workflow useless

I never did like Gnome, but I've been running kubuntu and it looks like I'll be going back to Mandriva. I always did like Mandriva and only switched because it looked like it was dying. Maybe Canonical will come to their senses in time.

Re:I see

[AliasMarlowe]

The spirit of the Linux community sure has changed since 20 or even 10 years ago, where this sort of thing would have been shouted out as an example of the worst excesses of proprietary software.

Agreed. With luck, the ads will be delivered from Amazon AWS nodes or some other easily identifiable IP range which can be blocked...

Our router already blocks all incoming packets from all IP ranges belonging to Amazon AWS. This is because Amazon AWS is being used by just too many unidentifiable organizations which are trying to index or archive the web. I don't mind known bots indexing our web site (google, bing, yandex, docomo and similar bots are all welcome), and I don't mind identifiable IPs regularly sucking down lots of content, since our usage is uncapped. However, I object to our web site being gulped down in a single visit by unknown and anonymous organizations.

Re:I see

[MECC]

Mint has actually done a pretty good job of making Gnome3 work very much like Gnome2. You can run it with a UI called Cinnamon, that's even more like Gnome2.

However, Mint puts their own google search in the browser so when you use the browser's search field, it uses Mint's google search. Still, that beats adware built into the desktop.

If neither Mint nor Amazon/Unity/Ubuntu works and Gnome 3 sucks, try Lubuntu.

Re:I see

[Gordonjcp]

- everything runs full-screen. That sucks. No drag and drop between windows, without first un-maximising them.

Uhm, no it doesn't, and checking back to 11.04 it didn't even then.

- after you close an application in a not-maximised window, it will relaunch maximised. I un-maximised it not just because!

No it doesn't, and it didn't in 11.04

- the above works when the not maximised window is - the "start" menu sucks. A few "favourite" applications, the rest you have to search for. A HUGE screen area taken for each application; scrolling galore as I don't have a 25" monitor. Or you have to start typing the name of the application to narrow down your search. Big suck. A well arranged menu searches quicker, takes little space, and no need to remove my hand from the mouse.

I must admit in "old-fashioned" UIs like Gnome 2 I mostly start with alt-f2 and begin typing the name of the thing I want to run. That still works in Unity, although it works better if you just hit the <meta> key.

- crtl-tab window switching did not work. I had to dig deep first online then on my machine to get that basic switcher working

I don't think <ctrl-tab> ever switched windows - in Firefox it switches tabs though. Maybe you're thinking of <alt-tab> which switches windows but was admittedly buggy as all hell in 11.04? It works pretty well in 12.04 though.

Re:I see

[AliasMarlowe]

I never did like Gnome, but I've been running kubuntu and it looks like I'll be going back to Mandriva. I always did like Mandriva and only switched because it looked like it was dying. Maybe Canonical will come to their senses in time.

You might want to take a look at Mageia, then. It's a healthy, free, and libre fork of Mandriva (which staggered onto the dark side of commercialism, bleeding from all discernible orifices).

Re:I see

[jbicha]

Because the MATE developers don't know what they're doing... Attempting to maintain all of GNOME 2 by themselves has always been a stupid decision.

Re:I see

[wvmarle]

I'm first and foremost a user.

If it doesn't work properly out of the box, it sucks. That's the state Linux was in 15 years ago.

Ubuntu was good, it's regressing. Time to look for alternatives. I have to upgrade soon anyway or lose security updates.

Re:I see

[wvmarle]

If I get the exact same results by going to Google directly or going through the Firefox/Mint search box with the difference that in the second case Google pays a bit to Firefox/Mint, I'm using that second option.

Re:I see

[hairyfeet]

Which just proves what I've been saying, there is no money to be made in Linux desktops. Canonical will join the ranks of Corel, Linspire, Xandros, Mandriva, and more we have forgotten in the list of failed Linux desktop business ventures.

In server you can make money with support, there is simply no business selling support to home and business desktop users. Windows server can cost many thousands of dollars when you figure in the CALs and depending on what features you need, Windows desktops are $100 for Home and $140 for Pro, and a hell of a lot lower than that for OEMs. At numbers that low you have to get huge economies of scale going to pay for the developers, the lights, the building, but its a catch-22 because you can't make money until you get huge economies of scale but you can't survive long enough to get the huge economies of scale because the money runs out.

As I said here more than 2 years ago when Shuttleworth announced he would sink no more millions into Canonical that it was over and now we have the final nail. Look at their history since the Shuttleworth announcement...Ubuntu Netbook (trying to get into the netbook craze after the ship had sailed), selling search results to Yahoo, selling MP3s through Amazon, trying to get into the server business after Shuttleworth talking about how Ubuntu was gonna be "the desktop Linux" for the masses, trying to come up with Ubuntu Phone and Ubuntu TV...their entire history since that announcement has been that of a desperate company trying to find SOME way, any way, to stem the flow of red ink and find a positive revenue stream.

But I've said it before and I'll say it again...Linux on the server, the embedded space? There is money to be made there. as far as Linux on the phone it would be hard to see how Google is gonna make back their billion dollars a year development costs but of course Google wants as many eyeballs as possible so hard to know what their monetary strategy is, but on the desktop? Sorry, not gonna happen, as Shuttleworth found out it costs millions to make and support a Linux desktop and there is just no money there to be made, this is one area where being "free as in beer" hurts more than it helps.

Final prediction? Canonical joins the other dead Linux desktops in a year and a half, maybe sooner. All those based on Ubuntu better be switching to Debian as a base NOW because it won't be much longer before Shuttleworth pulls the plug and hits the lights on his way out. I wouldn't be surprised to read in a month or two he has it up for sale just to try to recoup some of the money, doubt there will be any takers though, just no money in desktops.

Re:I see

[wvmarle]

You say "it doesn't" well maybe the version number is wrong (was it 10.10 maybe? Not important) but it was my direct experience with Unity.

Especially the maximising was really irritating. And yeah alt-tab, you're right, I just didn't look what's printed on the buttons. I just know which one it is :-) And it was actually SWITCHED OFF. Completely OFF. The key combination just didn't do anything. The frustration!

Re:I see

[William Robinson]

I tried switching to Xubuntu, thanks to Unity. Xfce is much better. Works great for me. Hope they will not include this feature in Xubuntu OR atleast provide option to disable it.

Re:I see

[Gordonjcp]

I don't recall alt-tab being completely disabled at any point, unless you were trying a particularly buggy pre-release.

Anyway, a year later you could do worse than to try 12.04 LTS with Unity, in a VM if you prefer.

Re:I see

[penix1]

Blocking adverts is trivial. Hosts file, anyone?

Three things with this thought:

1. Why should one have to block something that they didn't ask for in the first place? This is the same logic as paying for cable channels then having to block those you don't want. It is senseless.

2. Blocking at the hosts file does nothing for the resources that this crap is using to pull the ads. That program is still running wasting processor cycles and ram space. And who knows what other "features" are tied to the ads? Disabling the ads may disable the OS. We just don't know at this point.

3. If they are willing to do this what other nastiness are they willing to pull in the name of making a quick buck off their users? There is an old saying, fool me once shame on you. Fool me twice shame on me.

Re:I see

[fustakrakich]

Hosts file, anyone?

YOU! Burn the witch!

Re:I see

[lightknight]

Easy, he's still young. His world is defined by a singular axis, and where you fall on it defines everything about you.

From his comments, he believes that everything on the left is filled with doubleplus goodness, righteousness, happiness, and the Obvious Thing To Do [TM}, and everything on the right is filled with pure evil, lies, filth, and harming orphans or something. That some people (let alone the majority) of them do not readily fit on this invisible line is blasphemy to him, and he will, no doubt, offer up a series of tests / examples that both confirm his own worldview while denouncing yours.

"Knowing where someone falls on the almighty invisible axis of politics - Better than a truthful debate!"

Re:I see

[cooliobongo]

doesnt matter if half of the userbase leaves, half of those who stay will bring revenue

Re:I see

[TwilightXaos]

This is Linux. Distro is a proper subset of Settings.

Re:I see

[hairyfeet]

Ya know I just have to say...I find this all VERY enlightening.

I mean here we have a company that was the darling of the community, who heaped praise upon it, yet when they are bleeding to death and trying to try to survive what does the community do? "ZOMFG block it!" or "I'm going somewhere else, how dare they try to keep the doors open!" and it just goes to show that ALL the community cares about is "free as in beer".

For a site that supposedly has so many libertarians you'd think TINSTAAFL wouldn't even have to be said, hell the history of the company since Shuttleworth stopped the gravy train has been one of desperation, even unity was an attempt to get an Ubuntu tablet, yet the nerd rage here at Canonical trying to keep the lights on is just incredible.

But I don't think anyone will have to worry for much longer, the era of "Linux for humans" that was Canonical is nearly over. When the community refuses to buy shit and blocks everything the check from Amazon won't even be enough to pay their phone bill. So long Canonical, it was a nice idea, too bad you can't make money on free desktops.

Re:I see

[fa2k]

It's more like taking your car in for service at an official repair shop, and having them put ads on the windscreen. You can change the windscreen somewhere else (in this analogy, you can even ask the same repair shop to change it back), but you may decide that the car maker is a scummy company and get a different car instead.

Re:I see

[Compaqt]

Have you tried Unity in Precise (12.04)? Or are you commenting off the atrocious previous versions?

Re:I see

[JayRott]

Frankly I like Cinnamon. It isn't quite there yet, but it is defiantly usable. MATE is a bit more complete, but after using Cinnamon for a few months it "feels" like it is outdated. YMMV

Re:I see

[The Snowman]

This is why Red Hat actually succeeds. They make their money from the enterprise users: servers and business desktops with RHEL. The "desktop for the masses" is Fedora. Everyone wins: Red Hat makes money from the server/enterprise market, and home users can reap the benefits of a solid distribution.

With Ubuntu you have a (until recently) good desktop distribution, but no clear way to make money and keep the train rolling. If Shuttleworth had created a server distro and aggressively marketed it, things probably would have turned out better than they will in another year or so. Just like Microsoft, Canonical is going to be late to the tablet party and pretty much locked out of the market. For a variety of reasons, Apple and Google control that market and it is unlikely that either Microsoft or Canonical will be able to control more than a few percent of the market. Definitely not enough to matter.

Re:I see

[Compaqt]

Well, one of the problems, I think is they have 500 employees. It seems like half of them are working on the "user experience" team. If they could maybe run a leaner operation, it might be easier not to be in the red.

Also, instead of having huge support contracts, how about basic-level subscriptions (like $5/mo or $30/year). That would give people the opportunity to pitch in without paying for a business support contract.

Re:I see

[Randle_Revar]

I don't pay for Ubuntu because I don't give a shit about it, and I don't use it. If they ever made a good product, and were doing useful, interesting things with it, I would probably be using it.. And yes, I would be willing to pay for it, but I would certainly not tolerate ads. I have donated money to other foss projects in the past, and will do so again. But Canonical makes an inferior product, so I ignore them.

Re:I see

[Electricity Likes Me]

+1 - Cinnamon is great. MATE is what I install on a server or system not capable of running Cinnamon.

Re:I see

[0123456]

You seem to have missed the fact that most of us abandoned Ubuntu when they forced Unity on us. So we no longer care whether they go bust.

Re:I see

[shellbeach]

you mean the second one, of those people remaining after the Unity / GNOME3 rendered any concept of multi-task workflow useless

Ok, I'm completely lost here -- how did Unity render "any concept of multi-task workflow useless"? You surely can't mean that you can't multitask with Unity, as there's a dock with all your running apps (and unopened favourite apps) sitting right there on the left-hand side of your screen. The dock shows you which apps are running, and the number of instances of each app. If there are multiple instances/windows for an app, clicking on the app icon raises and focuses the last-used window of that app; clicking again does an expose of all open windows for that app. Everyone's different of course, but I personally find that works one hell of a lot better than a Windows-esque taskbar for multitasking. And since you're also running compiz when using Unity, you've got all the inbuilt compiz goodness for desktop expose/window expose too.

I can't say I much like the idea of Amazon ads, incidentally, but I feel safe in the knowledge that I could always sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping (as noted in TFA) and get rid of that functionality if I wanted to. It's not like it's hard-coded into the system or anything.

You know, I totally get people having favourite distros; what I don't get is the fiery hate some people here seem to have for Ubuntu. It's not like the Ubuntu dev team ran over your dog; it's not even like they shipped their distro with a dysfunctional version of gcc. Live and let live, peeps ...

Re:I see

[jbicha]

What kind of support do you expect for $30/year?

Re:I see

[udachny]

Assuming everyone puts in according to their ability, those on the left think you should receive according to your need, whereas those on the right think you should receive according to your might. It is that simple.

- having been born and grown in the former USSR helps to dispell such ridiculous notions by example.

The example is very simple: in a system like that (where a country is operated this way, not a small voluntary community, like a kibbutz, everybody's needs grow exponentially and everybody's abilities fall exponentially. Nobody produces and everybody wants to consume. That's it', it all falls apart, it's that simple and you can't do anything about it, it's the most obvious, the most human, the most rational behavior.

If you are a sucker and you do follow this idea by putting in all you can, you just end up being the scape goat for everything, because once you show any ability at all, you become responsible for everything that happens. Normally you are then responsible for all the bad things, while the good things that happen are 'shared' by everybody, that's the system that you think is viable, you only think it because you can't actually think worth a damn.

Saying that 'right' by definition is pure evil and the 'left' is by definition pure good is just another confirmation of complete lack of any independent and intelligent thought.

Re:I see

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazon is the antithesis of free, freedom, fairness, or anything that is nice in the world.

Sometimes you can be very insightful, but sometimes you sound like a blithering Idiot.

Canonical is just showing its stripes. It was doomed from the start. This is just another faux pas in a long list of atrocities. Maybe if these people would be willing to actually listen to their customers instead of forcing bizarre and immoral things on them like Amazon, then these people (the "free"-loaders, pun intended) would have more sympathy.

Re:I see

[Sipper]

A couple of notes concerning Mate, Cinnamon, Xfce, and KDE 4. Note that I'm writing this from a "Debian point of view" rather than it being Ubuntu-specific, simply because I don't run Ubuntu (for a bunch of reasons).

We might migrate to Mate or Cinnamon or similar after they settle down a little. I'll also reassess Gnome 3 after another couple of minor versions, in case it actually improves enough to be tolerable. Otherwise, we'll either stay with xfce or move to KDE.

I've recently tried Mate and Cinnamon, and they have a common problem: they don't seem to respect the "Debian menu". i.e. there are normal menu items that don't show up and instead you get the menu that Mate or Cinnamon wants to show you. My experience (in testing Ubuntu-based distros in VMs) is that Mate works in 2D, but Cinnamon is 3D-only, so it sucks to run Cinnamon in a VM. Mate hasn't been accepted into Debian, so it's not even an option for me to run right now. There are DDs that don't want it to be included, partly because it (supposedly) depends on old Gnome 2 libs, and partly because they'd rather see more effort put into Gnome 3 (which I cannot stand using). Cinnamon isn't in Debian either, probably for similar reasons. I've looked at both the Mate and Cinnamon packages available in the upstream repositories and both seemed to need work and didn't appear to be stable yet, and installing them via the external repositories looked troublesome.

Xfce is great, and what I generally recommend today, especially on low-end systems. Users I've given it to seem to like it too. The only thing I don't like (which is not really a problem with Xfce itself) is that Debian has changed the default network manager used for the Xfce task from wicd to network-manager, but this is is fixable because the package is a Recommends rather than Depends, so this is a minor complaint. I think the reason for the default change is that network-manager is IPv6 enabled where wicd is not. I've had several problems with network-manager that I don't have with wicd though, which is why I stick with wicd.

KDE 4 is good, but only if you turn off Nepomuk and Strigi file indexing, otherwise it runs terribly. [I'm primarily a KDE 4 user and love it otherwise.] These settings are in K->Settings->System Settings within Workspace Appearance and Behavior -> Destkop Search. It isn't easy to figure out what you'll be giving up by turning these features off, but thankfully someone has come up with a web page and document that explains these features. https://kdenepomukmanual.wordpress.com/2012/02/06/detailed-kde-nepomuk-manual/ One additional interesting thing to note about KDE 4 is that it can do compositing (or not, your choice, easily switchable via Alt+Shift+F12) without using compiz -- instead it's built-in. KDE 4 also has several rendering engines for both raster and OpenGL, so it works on both 2D-only and 3D enabled systems.

As for Unity -- no. 3D only so it sucks to run in a VM, and it interferes too much with how I work. Also I'm told that Unity is an add-on to compiz, and that systems that run for days get slower over time and eventually compiz crashes requiring a restart of X.

Re:I see

[ifiwereasculptor]

The "desktop for the masses" is Fedora. Everyone wins: Red Hat makes money from the server/enterprise market, and home users can reap the benefits of a solid distribution.

Minor nitpick: hell, no. Fedora is for developers. There are some good releases, like Goddard, but then there are lots of trainwrecks, too. You can call Fedora a good distro, for its purposes, but never say it's "solid", because it isn't. And, if you don't agree, then, in the words of a wise man: "I dare you - I double dare you, motherfucker - use Lovelock one more goddamn time". Try the KDE spin for added despair.

Re:I see

[Sipper]

Because the MATE developers don't know what they're doing...

Attempting to maintain all of GNOME 2 by themselves has always been a stupid decision.

Unfortunately after having a look at it, I agree. That said, I consider Gnome 3 to be a usability disaster, so there are good reasons why people are trying to get back the functionality they had with Gnome 2. Cinnamon is 3D only and Mate works in 2D. My choice as a fallback is Xfce. [I primarily use KDE 4, with Nepomuk and Strigi (in "Desktop Search") turned completely off.]

Re:I see

[emj]

On Gnome 2 i.e. Ubuntu 10.04 you can not use alt-tab while dragging something, this is a fundamental design error in metacity. It's apparently fixed in Ubuntu/Fedora etc see: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=135056 I don't know when it was fixed.

Re:I see

[Gordonjcp]

I'm saying it doesn't, because I've got a machine sitting in front of me running 11.04 trying these things out. I'm writing this post on that very machine.

I can't get any of those problems to show up. What do you want me to do, pretend I see them too?

Re:I see

[Xtifr]

Very true, and furthermore, within a distro, package selection generally is a subset of settings. While I use Debian at home, I tend to like Ubuntu at work, because it's quick and easy to get it running in a heterogenous network environment. But you can still take any version of Ubuntu and replace the default desktop with FVWM95, if that's what floats your boat.

Re:I see

[Compaqt]

None. It's just a way that you can send money to Ubuntu, and probably expense it, at less cost than the $105 support contract.

$30 is small enough that your boss won't even think about it. $105 and he starts thinking.

I know that back in the day people would buy boxed Redhat sets even though they could just download it for free just to support Redhat.

Re:I see

[CalcProgrammer1]

Ubuntu had an incredible set of ideals focused on doing good for the community, providing a "human friendly" open-source focused distro, and being a great asset to open source. This was in ~2006 when I started using 6.06, I really thought Canonical was doing a great job, what with providing free CD's, providing an entirely open distro, focusing on open software, keeping commercialization low....now they've corrupted into a commercial monstrosity who panders for the profits, and it shows bad. They've gone a complete 180 degree flip from open-source, community focused distro to screw-you-community, ad-spamming, over-commercialized madness in vain to try and force their profits on their users. Well? Screw you, Ubuntu, the users will move to the next open, community-focused distro like Mint while you rot in the dust.

When your core users are technical, open-source, FOSS-minded individuals, you can bet that dumping ads on them will hurt more than it will help. Either it'll be the first thing I uninstall, or if that isn't a possibility I'll ditch your crappy distro for Mint. That's how the open-source world works, if you screw up big time because you become greedy, someone will take your work and continue it with an open mindset. In this case, that someone is the Linux Mint team, and I lean ever closer to switching, especially now with their Cinnamon desktop, it blows Unity out of the water.

Ubuntu's core was providing a solid Debian-based desktop that integrated easy-to-use features for home/personal use. They focused too hard on expanding into non-existant markets (netbook/phone/Ubuntu Android/music store/software store/etc) and now they just look like a street beggar holding their hand out for the users to feed them with ad revenue. Nope, I'm fine, thank you very much, hope you die a painful, agonizing death as all your users realize your corruption and ditch you for a better distro. Goodbye, Ubuntu!

Re:I see

[dmbasso]

[...] and it just goes to show that ALL the community cares about is "free as in beer".

Not true. I don't mind paying for things I like/want (e.g. I buy all Humble Bundles, I donate every year to Wikipedia) but Canonical took the wrong road. Instead of taking advantage of the community they've built, they just decided to shove their decisions down people's throats. They're a private company, it is in their right to do that, but that was just fucking stupid.

What they could have done: their own 'kickstarter' for improvement/development projects. They already have that brainstorm.ubuntu.com, just make it able to receive financial support from the community.

Re:I see

[DriedClexler]

I migrated to Mint because of Unity (and other warnings that it would just get worse), but Mint has its own problems, like being flaky about not sleeping when you close your laptop, or being finicky about when it will show you the battery life.

Re:I see

[Gordonjcp]

Oooh, there's something about you can't alt-tab or alt-f2 when a taskbar indicator menu is open, like the volume control dropdown. Maybe that's it?

Re:I see

[stasike]

The problem is, you do not get the same results.
Mint also makes it difficult for you to change their Google search, restoring the config to the default after reboot.
When I discovered this fact, I actually went and tried out several other distros. Sigh ... I guess I am too spoiled by Mint and I wasn't satisfied with other systems.

When I type something like '1.2 * 123 Usd in Eur' into a vanilla Google, I get the numerical result. When I type those into the search box in firefox at Mint Linux, I do not get numerical result. There are many more examples.
Fortunately, it is trivial to *add* (not change the one installed by Mint ;-) ) additional search engine, so I added a Google.com search engine - the one that doesnt redirect you to regional version of Google.

For a time I tried to switch to the search engine provided by Mint for searches that I knew would provide very similar result, but I do not do that anymore. Sorry Clem. No revenue from my hijacked search queries.

In later versions Clem made pact with duckduckgo search engine and made that default. I tried to use duckduckgo as well, but, somehow, I gravitated back to using Google.com.

At the moment I use Mint Linux Maya KDE as my main home desktop.

Re:I see

[slack_justyb]

I second Gordonjcp! About 80% of the complaints that I've heard about Unity are just pure bunk. Many of the warehouses that I oversee have Ubuntu 12.04 with the Unity interface for many of the order processing stations and users have had great experiences with Unity. Additionally, I know many of the javascript developers in our IT department to be using Ubuntu 12.04 with the Unity UI. Never have heard a peep from them, more so, they get to choose the OS they want to use and they choose Ubuntu and Unity, that should say something.

Honestly, I think there's just a bunch of old timers that just object to everything that isn't GNOME 2 or KDE 3. To them that was the high point in desktop environments. They simply need to get over themselves.

Re:I see

[MichaelSmith]

Reading the article it seems that the adverts are little more than the search results you see in google. I think its okay to see commercial search results when I search for stuff, along with free stuff.

Re:I see

[MichaelSmith]

But google and amazon are making money from linux tablets.

Re:I see

[hairyfeet]

Don't you see? You are doing EXACTLY what I accused the community of doing! You had NO problem and lots of praise when they were literally flushing money down a toilet (such as the free CDs) but when they actually have to find a way to keep the lights on and the developers on the payroll its a "screw-you-community, ad-spamming, over-commercialized madness " which just proves my point which there is NO money on the desktop so trying to offer a desktop distro? completely pointless. You either use it as an alpha quality dumping ground to get the community to do free bug testing (Red Hat with Fedora) or you simply go for the enterprise market and ignore the desktop entirely.

If anyone wants to know why there will never ever be a year of the Linux desktop your post is the perfect example of why. To make a distro that could TRULY compete, I mean be able to stand toe to toe on the stability and features of Windows and OSX would easily cost 100 million dollars MINIMUM.

The entire graphics stack needs to be pulled (please don't give me the "X is great" rant because while its good for remote server administration it sucks balls as a desktop graphics stack), the audio subsystem needs to be replaced (Pulse is fucking terrible, the most likely to consistently break on update piece of the Linux stack except for wireless) and wireless is also a mess. ALL of that would have to be replaced along with a significant portion of the internals being forked so Torvalds and pals wouldn't break dozens of drivers each update, because the masses won't put up with that shit. They are used to having ALL their drivers run for the life of the OS, both OSX and Windows can be run from RTM to EOL with thousands of patches and the wireless, sound, graphics, it ALL just works.

But WHERE is this money gonna come from? Who is gonna pay for it? As you note in your own post you are offended by Canonical even trying to keep the lights on, where in the hell would a company get 100 million dollars to do the work that needs doing, not to mention the operating costs to stay afloat while its doing the work? Answer...it won't so Linux desktops are as dead as Dixie. The ONLY reason Linux was able to grab decent share in the server room was that MSFT under Ballmer is a trainwreck whose more concerned about stock prices than serving their customers, they charged assraping prices and adding obvious gouges like user CALs so it was cheaper to pay devs to fix Linux problems than deal with the expensive hedge maze that is WinServer licensing.

But that is NOT the desktop situation, OEM copies of Windows Home are less than $100 and on Oct 26th Win 8 Pro will be just $40, so there is simply no money to be made there for any Linux company. Add to that the fact that due to the viral nature of GPL V3, which yes it IS viral, even RMS admits as much in his blog as his goal was to close the loopholes and force anybody that uses GPL software to BE GPL themselves, so that companies like canonical can't even keep the code they made to make themselves different and there just isn't any way to stay afloat.

The mistake Shuttleworth made was using Linux, he should have used BSD. Then he could have kept his changes, giving Ubuntu a way to set itself apart from the crowd, and he could have charged $20 a copy once the buzz had built up and actually had a source of revenue to keep building and making it even better. In another year or two he may have even had enough cash to make Ubuntu BSD a real competitor to OSX and Windows, instead they will go the way of Xandros and Linspire and the community will go back to a bazillion half baked distros that don't really offer anything that can compete. Sad but that's the way it goes.

Re:I see

[MichaelSmith]

Ubuntu is full of advertisments for commercal applications right now. Why is the amazon proposal any different?

Re:I see

[hairyfeet]

To you and all the "I don't mind paying ACs" I have to call BULLSHIT. Do I REALLY need to list how many went tits up because rather than spend a dollar the users just jumped onto "Bob's distro" and left the devs high and dry? Mandriva, Linspire, Xandros, I could hit the wiki and fill that list out but why bother? Linux users WILL NOT PAY. Oh sure they'll throw a few more bucks to charity like the humble bundles, but actually pay for their OS? Well hell freezes over.

As i have said in the past it would cost a minimum of 100 million dollars to make linux truly competitive with Windows and OSX (If I listed all the parts that would have to be forked or replaced this would look like war & peace) but as we are seeing with Canonical its easier to squeeze blood out of a stone than get Linux users to pay for an OS. In the end free as in beer trumps all. How many of you work for free? How many of you donate your time in large quantities to do the truly shit work in Linux, like documentation, regression testing, bug fixing, QA and QC? Yeah, thought so.

This, this right here, is why FOSS as a philosophy yields more half baked incomplete software than anything else, because while everyone wants the OTHER guy to work for nothing THEY want to get paid. in a way I'd argue its the failure of communism all over again. Oh and before anybody mentions servers or Android? Google pays ONE BILLION DOLLARS for Android development and the fortune 500 companies pay hundreds of millions for Linux server development, Linux desktops? here is $3 and a candy bar. the money just isn't there and as Canonical found out you'll go broke long before you get it ready for the masses. Shuttleworth really should have went BSD, then he could have sold his OS because he could have kept his changes. How many "Ubuntu derived" distros are there? I rest my case.

Re:I see

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't object to the workflow or look and feel changes- its just different. Feature regression and overall API churn are what raise my hackles.

Re:I see

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh look, it's roman_mir, the libertarian troll and compulsive Slashdot poster.

Having said this, I'd rather live somewhere where the intelligent are blamed for failure and success is shared - rather than where we are now, in which everyone must share the burden of failure but rewards are reserved for a privileged few. So you post has made me more confident that I am correct. Thank you!

Re:I see

[dmbasso]

To you [...]

Ok, so you are talking about me.

I have to call BULLSHIT.

Why so angry? Besides, you are wrong about me.

How many of you work for free? How many of you donate your time in large quantities to do the truly shit work in Linux, like documentation, regression testing, bug fixing, QA and QC? Yeah, thought so.

Do I have to do all of that? Well, I have a lot of code I published under the GPL. I have some addons that were included in Blender, and also a patch to the Cycles renderer recently. Is this enough for you?

This, this right here, is why FOSS as a philosophy yields more half baked incomplete software than anything else,

There are lots of counterexamples, and that is what is important. Otherwise I would not be able to use GNU/Linux as my only desktop for over a decade now.

because while everyone wants the OTHER guy to work for nothing THEY want to get paid. in a way I'd argue its the failure of communism all over again.

Kickstarter, among many other crowdfunding initiatives, proves you wrong.

[...] and as Canonical found out you'll go broke long before you get it ready for the masses.

So Canonical went broke already? Nah, you just need a cup of STFU.

Shuttleworth really should have went BSD, then he could have sold his OS because he could have kept his changes. How many "Ubuntu derived" distros are there? I rest my case.

I see you took a class on FOSS by Steve Ballmer. I hope you get as good a grade on the chair-throwing and coke-snorting-developers^n-shouting classes.

Re:I see

[eric_herm]

Using BSD, he would not have been able to use the free work force of all others companies working on Linux ( like Red hat, like Suse, like Mandriva ). And regarding the fact that GPL do not permit to stay afloat, it seems that Red Hat passed the million dollar mark, that Suse is doing quite well and there is lots of others companies doing well ( like the various group working around Drupal ). Let's face it, the license is not that important, if you are doing a crappy job, the license will not save you. I have seen GPL product failling, I have seen proprietary product failing, and there is example of working model around proprietary and GPL stuff, ( or even BSD for that matter ).

License do not matter as much as people believe from a business success point of view. That's like choosing your characters in WoW. All have their weakness and strength, and you can play and win with all of them.

Re:I see

[eric_herm]

In fact, people paid for Mandriva, they were starting to recover thanks to the Mandriva Club. Then Canonical came and said "we are giving this for free", so people went to Ubuntu. People also paid for Suse back in the time of the boxed set ( around 10 to 15 years ago ). And people also paid for Red Hat Linux before they switched to the whole RHEL business.

So who managed to spoil the game by throwing money to grab the market ? Oh yes, Mark Shuttleworth. And who now discovered he is in deep trouble ? The same Mark Shuttleworth. That's too bad, but that's like Facebook or any startup. If you do not plan for sustainability and even manage to destroy the business model of others, you just deserve what happen to you.

Re:I see

[martin-boundary]

Meh, BFD!

Re:I see

[TheSeatOfMyPants]

It's likely because the Right is more corporate-friendly, consistently tries to put their rights over those of human beings and pass generous tax cuts/subsidies for corporations by slashing the funding for schools or other public services average people use.

Re:I see

[realityimpaired]

The previous versions were bad enough that I don't really have any desire to try a newer version. In seriousness, however, can you honestly give me a good reason to consider switching to Unity when I'm already happy and productive with e17?

I think the answer to that question will give you the answer to why people hate Unity so much. They were happy with a system that worked well for them, and which gave them a workflow that they were used to. Without even considering the merits of Unity itself, why did they need to foist it on people who were happy where they were?

I understand fully the desire to have a system that works for new users, and which is relatively intuitive, but they threw the baby out with the bathwater, and the "classic" interface was half-assed, from all I've heard about it. Now again, I don't use it... I use e17, and have done for years.... before that I was on XFCE, and before that KDE... last time I used Gnome, RedHat 6.2 was bleeding edge. But honestly, did they really need to ditch Gnome and the UI that everybody as used to and happy with, and did they really need to push Unity to users who were already working with Gnome the next time they updated their system?

Re:I see

[davester666]

They announced how many users they currently have: 12.1

And it REALLY sucks to be that .1 person

Re:I see

[Bill Dog]

If you've followed Slashdot for any non-negligible amount of time, you should have grokked that 1) it's almost completely Leftists here, and 2) they define Left-wing software as that which is made and licensed to oppose capitalism; specifically, its for-profit and private property rights legs. So ads in copyleft software represents an obvious intrusion of the other side's values.

Re:I see

[HJED]

From TFA I got the impression this was a unity only 'feature', hopefully kubuntu won't be effected.

Re:I see

[Ltap]

Virtually all of these complaints are about kernel drivers or software distros have little to no control over. I am not defending Canonical, just saying that any change to these changes things for distros everywhere.

Re:I see

[formfeed]

That's one side of it.

The other story is that of a distro that knows better than the user and tries to come across as hip and creative - Which works if you're Apple. And to some degree that's the kind of user where Ubuntu sees its market. Just look at the Ubuntu fan-blogs: "Randy Rabbit comes with a whole new set of shiny background graphics and new icons."

But to become a major player, it needs not only to be shiny but also reliable. Reinventing the wheel every April and breaking things for the sake of being creative doesn't help. And other than Apple, they build massively on an open source community that is still nerd - not hipster - driven. So, if you can't listen to users - even if there is massive criticism - you get what you deserve and end like another once good and innovative distro, Mandrake.

Re:I see

[street_astrologist]

"Kindle Fire HD" returns no hits when searching the KDE 4.9 Menu in my Quantal Kubuntu.

Re:I see

[hairyfeet]

Moving the goalposts, I even mentioned Red hat and pointed out that SERVERS and desktops are as different as a corporate yacht and a dingy, there really is NO comparison. Corporations WILL pay for support, consumers and SMBs won't, not for a desktop, and as we have seen time and time again the GPL ends up leaving the desktop company with a "tin cup" model that makes it impossible to plan for the future.

so sorry, not talking about servers, routers, or what runs on the toaster, talking about desktops which the death of Canonical will put the final nail in the "year of the Linux desktop" myth. Oh the community won't accept it, they too will try to move the goalposts by claiming cell phones are the new desktops (horseshit) or that since the webservers are Linux that means they "won" (again horseshit, that's like routers, backend crap nobody that isn't in corp sees nor cares about) but in the end the simple fact is the GPL means you just can't make a living on the desktop, never happen.

Re:I see

[Knuckles]

And it doesn't in the Unity version with the supposed "ads" either. People are overreacting, this aren't ads, but search suggestions. Personally I don't see the harm of getting additional Amazon results when searching for music on my machine. From the very start of Unity, Ubuntu promised that they will build a system the closely integrates the local desktop with the Internet. One does not have to like it, but acting surprised is ricidulous.

Re:I see

[Knuckles]

LMAO at the people talking about "blocking". How about simply uninstalling the shopping lens (and investigating a situation before using big words? Oh well, Slashdot ...)

Re:I see

[unixisc]

Either that, or if one is agnostic about Linux/BSD, one could use GhostBSD, which still doesn't use Gnome 3. The only BSD that offers Gnome3 is OpenBSD.

Re:I see

[unixisc]

Or PCLinuxOS, which too is derived from Mandriva

Re:I see

[unixisc]

Not just that, but you'd probably want to switch to a distro that is from the same family as the other. Yeah, if you are returning to Mandriva, you could, as the above poster suggeste, switch to Mageia or PCLinuxOS. Or, within the Kubuntu family, switch to Mint KDE, or Zorin or any other Debian or Ubuntu based Linux distro.

Re:I see

[unixisc]

Final prediction? Canonical joins the other dead Linux desktops in a year and a half, maybe sooner. All those based on Ubuntu better be switching to Debian as a base NOW because it won't be much longer before Shuttleworth pulls the plug and hits the lights on his way out. I wouldn't be surprised to read in a month or two he has it up for sale just to try to recoup some of the money, doubt there will be any takers though, just no money in desktops.

Why do they need to do that? They could switch to one of the downstream Ubuntu based distros - there are quite a handful out there, such as Mint (the #1 right now), Zorin, Hybryde and a whole lot more. In fact, most of the Linux distros too are Ubuntu spinoffs, and none of them sport Unity, so there is that differentiation right there. And these distros won't go away - they'll keep deriving stuff from Debian, and can focus on their own products. The need not do even kernel updates - look @ gNewSense - they can stop @ a particular kernel, and just focus on providing full support, bug fixes, ensuring compatibility w/ new applications and so on.

Re:I see

[unixisc]

The mistake Shuttleworth made was using Linux, he should have used BSD. Then he could have kept his changes, giving Ubuntu a way to set itself apart from the crowd, and he could have charged $20 a copy once the buzz had built up and actually had a source of revenue to keep building and making it even better. In another year or two he may have even had enough cash to make Ubuntu BSD a real competitor to OSX and Windows, instead they will go the way of Xandros and Linspire and the community will go back to a bazillion half baked distros that don't really offer anything that can compete. Sad but that's the way it goes.

I really agree w/ this. He was previously w/ Debian, and Debian too does a kFreeBSD project. Its difference from BSD is that Debian combines this w/ GNU userland. But of later, Debian, which had been blackballed by RMS, has been more friendly to the open source movement and joined the OSI, and even for their kFreeBSD project, they have not mentioned whether they'll do it under BSDL or GPL. So Shuttleworth could either have based his project off PC-BSD, which would have been great - their latest version moves more things from CLI to their Control Panel - from system configuration to administration - and gone all out BSD. Or, if he had loyalties to Debian, he could have gone w/ Debian's kFreeBSD.

In fact, I'd say that even now, he could alongside Ubuntu Linux, start a new project called Ubuntu BSD, base it on PC-BSD or kFreeBSD, leverage the work Ubuntu is doing putting Wayland on Linux (which substitutes X for the graphics compositing) and then offer things like Unity on it - and preferably, have some other DEs available as well, such as Razor-qt, LDXE, XFCE and Etoille. But this time, instead of giving it away for free, have pre-loading arrangements w/ vendors to sell it along w/ their stuff, or alternatively, get into the PC business itself, where he can leverage the cost over the PCs or laptops that Ubuntu sells (PC-BSD already comes w/ KDE, LXDE, XFCE, GNOME2, WindowMaker, Enlightenment & a few others.). Heck, they could even be ARM based laptops, in which case, they are locked on his OS and can't trivially do distro-hopping. Since BSD is not Linux, stuff shouldn't break, and like Apple, he can restrict his choices to a limited range of hardware, and maybe use an 'Ubuntu store' (the way Apple uses Mac stores) to be the central point where people can get hardware or software they know will work under Ununtu BSD.

Re:I see

[galanom]

I must admit in efficient, rational, workable UIs like Gnome 2

Fixed it for ya!

Re:I see

[unixisc]

Had they used BSD - say PC-BSD, what exactly would they have lost? Libre-Office? It runs on both. Calligra suite? Runs on both. In fact, KDE provides a rich suite of apps that run on it. Not talking about servers here, so Apache, Nginx, Sendmail, et al is irrelevant here. Once you take out all those server apps, Linux & BSD are pretty much awash as far as desktop goes. Yeah, PC-BSD has far fewer drivers, but guess what? A driver written for FreeBSD 7.x is still likely to work today - something that doesn't happen in Linux.

In fact, I'd say that that is the only disadvantage of BSD - that it supports a more limited range of hardware. But guess what - when a new Linux kernel or GNU userland is released, they are back to square one as far as those go. Not so w/ BSD. And if you provide a home user w/ things like a browser (Firefox/Chrome/Konqueror/Opera), a mail tool (Thunderbird/Seamonkey/Kmail), an office suite (Libre-Office, Calligra Suite) and a good DE (KDE, Etoille, Razor-qt), that would be good enough. Under KDE alone, it has a variety of small apps, which could use some refining (such as Kexi or Stage), but other than that, it should be good. And in the unlikely event that they'll miss any Linux apps, they can run Linux jails under PC-BSD, just like in Windows 7, one can run Virtual PC to run one's old XP apps. Currently, the Linux distros supported are Debian & Gentoo. Debian support means running any Ubuntu stuff already out there, to the extent that it matters.

Re:I see

[unixisc]

Well, the bulk of Linux users don't want to buy their OS for, say, $20, don't want ads... As Hairyfeet noted, a whole bunch of distros went down for that very reason - the GPL simply doesn't support any desktop relevant business models.

Re:I see

[Caffinated]

>that Red Hat passed the million dollar mark

Woah, a whole million dollars! That's *such* a lot of money. </sarcasm>

s/million/billion/g
Minor difference.

Re:I see

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

Then what's holding you back ? It's not like the right is somehow preventing you from migrating to a communist country (only communist countries see the need to prevent their citizens leaving), or even joining a communist community right in the US.

Why don't you ?

Here's my theory. Because you (and 99% of "leftists" on slashdot) :
1) will defend whatever seems more popular, not their own opinion, which is pretty leftists at the moment.
2) live according to what is in reality somewhere between right and extreme-right behavior, which is of course what you really believe in. If you are to be judged by actions, not words.

Re:I see

[curmudgeon kate]

To the first two complaints, about maximized windows: The default settings (which were not changeable in Unity 2D) gave that impression in 11.04, if you had a small screen (e.g., laptop). If a window had been at greater than 70-something percent of the screen size, it was maximized upon re-opening. I remember it well because it drove me nuts and taught me not to minimize windows. Auto-hide the launcher was also the default.

The defaults in 12.04 are, for me, much better. Launcher auto-hide is off, and windows don't auto-maximize.

Re:I see

[atomicxblue]

Mate, as far as Linux Mint 13 is concerned, ships with two versions of the menu. You have the regular Mate menu, but also have the option to have the good ol' Gnome 2 menu.

Re:I see

[binarybod]

Well after being with Ubuntu since 8.04 I left. I moved (eventually) to Sabayon KDE - WOW, I mean, WOW! I now have control, real control, GUI and command line - equo/rigo is king, long live the king. Gnome 3, Unity - Hah!

Re:I see

[Burz]

In server you can make money with support, there is simply no business selling support to home and business desktop users.

There is money in supporting Mac and Windows desktops.

A main reason for the difference is that supporting "Linux Desktop" users is much less logistically feasible due to its amorphous nature. You have to support multiple UIs per distro, so there is enormous pressure to avoid the GUI and guide users to the CLI, and the CLI feels very unfriendly to users.

What also feels unfriendly and confusing to users is that they can have a few friends, family or coworkers who "switched to Linux too!" And that seems neat and reassuring until the moment you realize their systems look and interact very differently from the Linux system you are trying to get used to.

Re:I see

[Yvanhoe]

I did that when they switched to unity and yet, after several month of debian, I will come back to Ubuntu. Why? Integration is better. It took me a day to make multiscreen work, discover that ATI driver does not work with debian's version of X.org, suspend does not work and I have overheating issues. So their choice of packages sometimes suck a bit, especially if you happen to be on the development side of things, their UI really sucks and I hate being imposed a way to work, but luckily one can install gnome classic, enlightnement or KDE.

Are users the product? This is a stupid question. Here is another : How does Canonical get money from you? I don't pay them anything so the fact that they could be profitable by serving me is a miracle. If they manage to find a way to make money without forcing me to pay, without forcing me to use proprietary software and without selling my personal data, I m all for it. If it means I'll need to uninstall a few packages before using my system correctly, I'll do it.

Re:I see

[Sipper]

Mate, as far as Linux Mint 13 is concerned, ships with two versions of the menu. You have the regular Mate menu, but also have the option to have the good ol' Gnome 2 menu.

I'll have to look for that; thanks.

Re:I see

[TranquilVoid]

it just goes to show that ALL the community cares about is "free as in beer"

You have this the wrong way around. People don't dislike Ubuntu showing ads because it costs users money (it doesn't, except very indirectly) or because it provides money for Canonical. They dislike it because ads introduce corporate corruption into their OS. Users can no longer trust the motivation behind the product and therefore the product itself. This is "free as in speech".

For the record, the story is misguided. They're not ads, they're search results. If you were a keen model train enthusiast you could theoretically add the search for whichever website is appropriate for that (in the future, I think it's hard-coded to Amazon right now). That said, I have no interest in seeing external results when I search my computer. That level of integration is over-reaching.

Re:I see

[hairyfeet]

Thanks again, and more importantly what would have NOT happened if they went BSD? they wouldn't have had a good dozen "Based on Ubuntu" copies making sure they never had a chance of selling a single copy!

Imagine, for all those that don't get it, that you spent millions making the perfect lightbulb, its perfect in every way but because of the millions you spent making it you need $5 a piece to make any profit, and $3 just to break even. But now imagine that thanks to a license I can simply take that exact design you just spent millions on, get it cranked out in China, and sell it for 99c because its only costing me 76c to make it. you'd be pissed, right? And nobody would follow in your footsteps, who'd want to be in that business?

Which is EXACTLY why I say GPL works in SOME places but it does NOT, I repeat DOES NOT work in ALL places, and desktops are one of those places. There is simply no way to pay for all the support, the coders, the building and lights and advertising and all the other things that go into truly taking on OSX and Windows because thanks to the way the GPL is set up there is simply no way to make any money on desktops. Again I hate having to say this but every time you point this out someone will bring up servers, that's like saying there is no money in small trucks and they say "But I'm making good money selling boats"...WTF? not even the same thing, not even close, the only thing in common is they both run X86 hardware.

With BSD they could have fixed any disadvantages and more importantly KEPT that work so that they could actually sell the OS at...ohhh lets say $20 a copy, and thus could have stayed afloat. Now Shuttleworth has blown millions of dollars and all they'll get for it is a spot in the dustbin where linspire and Xandros and every other company that tried to use linux to make a great desktop OS, there just isn't any way to make money on GPL if it isn't corporate.

Re:I see

[hairyfeet]

Actually as someone that actually does that for a living? I can tell you Windows, if done right, really shouldn't be bringing any repeat business, just referrals. Linux on the other hand has pulse breaking, X server issues, WiFi is a mess, and it tends to hose one or more systems every single update. I have Windows users that go years without needing me, even my "disaster area" client Ms. Pipkin only needs me once or twice a year and those are when she does a "WTF?" like tonight when i remoted into her system and she had FIVE, I shit you not, FIVE antiviruses running.

Believe me it is NOT the UI, if it was just that I'd just stick to a set of standard apps and KDE and be happy to sell linux boxes besides the Windows boxes, but its the after sales support, the constant beta quality futzing the devs do, that make it not worth dealing with. Hell Dell has to run their own fricking repo even though they only offer 8 Ubuntu models! Its THAT level of hassle that keeps little guys like me from supporting Linux, not the UIs.

Re:I see

[aliquis]

stick a fork in Canonical

You want a Linux mint with that?

Re:I see

[KingBenny]

dare i recommend linux mint, the cinnamon version really got me for now

Re:I see

[Burz]

It is the UI, partly. When you do phone support for a top-tier GUI app on Linux as I have, the lack of consistency is a big aggravating factor. It wastes a lot of time, effort and customer good will. And when many of those customers are also developers, you see the realization sinking in that Linux is a lousy target for writing a GUI application. You see them switching to Windows.

Hell Dell has to run their own fricking repo even though they only offer 8 Ubuntu models! Its THAT level of hassle that keeps little guys like me from supporting Linux, not the UIs.

Well then you shouldn't try going into smartphones because that is similar to the update model for phones. Dell taking ownership of hardware compatibility issues is probably the motivation for having it that way.

Frankly, I think the whole 'distro-repository' thing is a miasma on the desktop. Repositories and package managers, as Linux distros have implemented them, ought to be restricted to managing the core OS+GUI. And keep them the hell away from managing user-facing applications, which should not get caught up in spider-web-like dependency relationships. Apps need a separate, cleaner system for distribution that is also very friendly to ISVs.

Of course, hardware compatibility also figures large in how well Linux fares with the average user. Most Linux desktops are not distributed by a hardware vendor, but OS X, Windows and Android are.

Torvalds and the rest of the Linux kernel project somehow give a very good appearance of trying to accommodate various hardware, but in reality they are accommodating that hardware under conditions geared toward sysadmin and hacker types so they don't anticipate barriers and snags that the rest of the people may encounter. They leave it to the distros, which are so disconnect from OEMs they might as well be on another planet.

Re:I see

[unixisc]

One thing a Linux distro can do to eliminate the breakage is simple - freeze the kernel, and stop doing kernel updates. After all, some of the newest kernel updates are about things that may have nothing to do w/ the desktop, like support for btrfs, support for the OpenRISC CPU, etc. Let's say a distro maker took Linux 3.0, took whatever libraries, drivers and other utilities work on it, mount on it X11 or Wayland (hopefully the latter will become available before too long) and then a decent DE, such as KDE, Razor-qt or even LXDE or XFCE. Yeah, Linux needs security updates, but one doesn't have to update the kernel to get those. So what a distro can do is freeze the kernel, glibc, X11, ALSA/PulseAudio and GTK/Qt versions that it's based on, and then do any improvements from there. If a newer software is out that works w/ a newer library, work on porting it to this version. Don't upgrade all these things which will in turn break more stuff that already works.

This is the only scenario in which I can see any Linux distro succeed. Such a distro can have versions, but where improvements are tangible ones, and not invisible ones like the kernel being upgraded, & so on. That way, one can be sure that if that distro is upgraded, nothing will break, b'cos the innards of the OS are not really being changed, except for maybe security updates, if any.

Re:I see

[infinitelink]

Honestly, I think there's just a bunch of old timers that just object to everything that isn't GNOME 2 or KDE 3. To them that was the high point in desktop environments.

Perhaps for non-trivial use-cases, where the Desktop Environment was highly configurable/adaptable for thousands of use cases and combinations for preference, and extremely functional with well-though-out features that accumulated over time, they were.

Take XFCE. I use it because it's light: I use Linux where I can because I don't have to wait on the OS for basic tasks when I don't want to buy uber-dooper-super-stupid high-end hardware when we should be able to compute just fine on anything from the last five years. Yet well-considered Gnome features like CTRL+L to move the cursor to the url/address bar, or tabs in the file manager--basics on Open Source and alternative (to Win Explorer) file managers for years, just aren't present: actually, thousands of nifty things which, in DEs that weren't necessarily light, but also weren't nearly as heavy as their modern, less-functional successors, are missing from the otherwise excellent XFCE (which is too young and...which the coders apparently re-write every version).

A big part of MS's success has been that they don't re-invent the wheel to make it easier on their programmers: if it works, they evolve it slowly [enough], and leave things in place needed by programmers of software for their platform, rather than coders of the platform. That is why Linux on the desktop hasn't happened where it is easier to buy with Windows: if the software was available I could sell twenty people on Linux tomorrow, but companies know better than to trust the open source community IN GENERAL. (That is, an individual involved in open source may be hirable, but they're going to check carefully first: and yes, big execs have told me this in person--not stupid, inconsiderate ones who just follow fads, either).

Of course it's different if service is your revenue generator. Then, breaking **** is a very good idea; whether it's actually broken, or it's just that putting-together a solution is hard enough that the expertise of those who made the software is also needed to make it work as desired. That's why this stuff is no problem to Google, IBM, etc.: that's their model. Making Linux viable is not hard: it's just the legal threats that are a problem, and the technical stuff is simply a matter of choosing most-functional/efficient-enough. I convert people to Linux so they can avoid antivirus and firewall costs (no longer a prob with MSSE) and their less-than-stellar computers pausing too much even for simple tasks (still a very big problem with the massively over-coded Windows), and once it is set-up and locked-down (including updates, which can't install without me), they love it: even getting games working on Wine, though at times a PITA, tends to result in better performance due to the greater speed and efficiency of the kernel.

BUT it's not a platform--at all--in the sense of something that is relatively reliably the same system wherever found; it's not an ecosystem of software that outsiders have confidence in: Canonical had the biggest opportunity due to mindshare, but blew it years ago, and keep blowing it. MINT actually seems, despite having one guy, to now be doing it somewhat better EVEN WHEN THEY CHANGE EVERYTHING--BECAUSE THEY GO FOR BEST TEACH/DESIRES OF USERS, NOT THE DEVS! And the XFCE dev/s are a close second if not in the running for first or even slightly ahead. But Ubuntu...no, maybe attractive for enterprise but not the home.

When I was perhaps just 14 I stumbled in to using Linux, and realized the huge edge and potential in Linux for undermining commercial alternatives by its ability to keep perfectly good hardware up-and-running: I had an old machine and I soon learned how to set-up streaming servers and have multiple inbound connections all connecting to a low-end, old, home computer that was encoding and transmitting one file to another format...

Re:I see

[hairyfeet]

The problem with that idea, which I agree on the surface makes plenty of sense, is that thanks to the lack of an ABI (which Linux users will scream they don't need, but not only does every. other. major. OS have one but the ONLY argument put forth by a dev was a religious one complete with "I hope all non free drivers break", nice attitude from a kernel dev) the software ends up tied to which kernel you are using, so you jump on the breakage rollercoaster or quickly ALL of the software ends up out of date.

I mean go to ANY major Linux software website and alongside the source and the .deb files you'll see a note about which kernel it uses. that is just a fucked up design and frankly a bad deal if you wanna compete as most Windows software from the late 90s/early 00s will still run, and just about all OSX X86 software will run on the latest release.

So I agree completely with your idea, the problem is until you got as influential as Shuttleworth with his "cadence" mantra you'd be forced to pay devs to backport and run your own custom repo, which ironically is EXACTLY what Dell does to keep Ubuntu from breaking their drivers.

Re:I see

[hairyfeet]

Well the way you could get around the UI problem is a universally installed app along the lines of "Windows Remote Assistance" which was the BIG deal that I pushed my customers hard to switch for. Whomever at MSFT invented that should have gotten a raise and a company car, doesn't matter if they have a dynamic address or NAT, they just give me the code and i can remote in from across town or even in another state. Its a real Godsend when you can actually see what they are seeing and control the whole thing, just wonderful for administration.

And with phones you have ZERO hardware changes for the life of the device, none at all. You'd think Torvalds and the devs futzing wouldn't break the most bog standard stuff but what finally made me give up on Linux in my shop was how many times I'd have fricking plain hardware, your Realtek and Sigmatel onboard that has been around for half a decade, ancient IGPs like Radeon 2x and Intel 8xx chips just crap all over themselves because some dev decided to fiddle with a pointer and crap all over the drivers.

but I agree we need to lay the blame where it belongs, Torvalds and the system devs. Look up the ONLY complaints they had over something as standard as an ABI, which BSD, Solaris, Windows, OSX, even OS/2 has, and you'll see it boils down to "If I have an ABI I can't tweak stuff like I want" which is a classic childish hacker mentality and NOT the mentality of someone who is in charge of code millions depend on. The disconnect as you point out is truly insane, its a game of hot potato with everyone pointing at everyone else and nothing getting done. Its sad but this is why guys like me can't sell and support Linux, and why there will never be a "year of the Linux desktop" because it just costs too much to support.

Re:I see

[fustakrakich]

Left-wing software as that which is made and licensed to oppose capitalism...

You misspelled corruption. Your 'left-wing' stuff sure is funny. Thanks for the laughs.

Re:I see

[highphilosopher]

Ironically this is the reason most linux users I've talked to won't try Windows 7. "XP was bad enough, why should I try the new one?"

Granted, it's a $100 thing to try, but it struck me as ironic. Now it's time to be struck with the bad Karma :)

Uninstall?

[Stonent1]

I'm sure they'll be uninstalled shortly.

Re:Uninstall?

[Dogtanian]

You realize paying for a prime membership is useless, since you can have 3 months for free with a a new account? Just keep making new accounts every 3 months.

Have you actually done this yourself?

Surely they have something about this in the terms and conditions and a check in place to ensure that people don't keep doing this. My boss opened a second Merchant Account with Amazon.co.uk (under a slightly different name and email) some years after his first one had been closed following problems with customer service (*). Shortly afterwards they closed the new account claiming it was connected with an older one, but giving no explanation as to why. Given that (IIRC) this was shortly after we'd set up the bank details (or something similar), it was quite obvious that they had some sort of system set up to spot this sort of thing automatically.

(*) It should be made clear that this was Amazon's fault. I don't remember the exact details (I didn't work there at the time, and it was several years ago now), but apparently Amazon had repeatedly failed to notify us of orders that had been placed or pass on other essential details as they should have, with the result that we'd been given the blame. The new account was reinstated after we provided clear evidence to Amazon that the original problems had been due to their incompetence. Second time round I'm not saying it was perfect, but it wasn't that bad.

Re:Uninstall?

[Cinder6]

You realize paying for a prime membership is useless, since you can have 3 months for free with a a new account?
Just keep making new accounts every 3 months.

Or, you could be, you know, honest.

Side note: I signed up for Amazon Student in January, which gave me a free, six-month Prime membership with the option to continue using it for $40/year instead of the usual $75/year (or however much it is). I cancelled the auto-renew, but even now, nine months later, I still have Prime. Not sure what's going on, but I'm also not going to complain if Amazon wants to give me free shipping. I know it didn't just self-renew, because I still don't have access to free Instant Videos, and I never got a confirmation email or even a charge.

Re:Uninstall?

[Cinder6]

Because you're not "making use of" the system, you're abusing it.

Re:Uninstall?

[Knuckles]

You can kill people without being caught as well.

Re:Uninstall?

[loufoque]

This a stupid comparison. There is nothing illegal about this.

Re:Uninstall?

[Knuckles]

Point remains that just because you can do something does not make it right.

Re:Uninstall?

[loufoque]

There is no such thing as "right" or "wrong".
There is what the law allows and what the law does not allow.

The law does not allow killing, but it does allow making as many Amazon accounts as you like.

Honestly not that bad

[TechieRefugee]

It really isn't. I mean come on, a distro as large as Ubuntu is gonna need revenue from places other than donations. And, as long as it isn't too obtrusive in the UI, I won't really complain about it. Besides, there's always other flavors of Ubuntu which may have the ad feature removed.

Re:Honestly not that bad

[eugene ts wong]

That sounds great, but I wonder if they got PulseAudio working. I couldn't imagine finding an ad on a desktop, and then struggling with the sound system. If they could get a system that just worked, or worked better than the competition, then the ad would be fine for me. Ignoring bug reports, and then focusing on this is like a backhand to the face.

Upgrade me once, shame on you. Upgrade me twice, shame on me.

Re:Honestly not that bad

[Anonymous Coward]

as long as it isn't too obtrusive in the UI

Any ads in the UI of the OS are too obtrusive.

Re:Honestly not that bad

[betterunixthanunix]

I mean come on, a distro as large as Ubuntu is gonna need revenue from places other than donations

Then they should do the one thing that actually turns a profit for free software vendors: subscriptions (for e.g. support, updates, etc.), targeting business users. If Ubuntu is now turning to ad revenue as a way to make money, they must really be in trouble (or they just do not get "it").

Re:Honestly not that bad

[jedidiah]

I dunno. Perhaps they should try what every other serious consumer oriented distribution has done: actually sell the product.

Re:Honestly not that bad

[foniksonik]

That's up next. First it's Free but ad-supported, next it's "pay to remove ads".

Re:Honestly not that bad

[zippthorne]

What's wrong with PulseAudio? Hasn't it just kinda worked (from a user perspective) for quite some time now?

I haven't used ubuntu in a while, but the last time I used it, in a virtual machine, no less, I didn't have any issues with the sound.

Re:Honestly not that bad

[Lefty2446]

Seriously? Ubuntu is not a top tier distro. They get the bulk of their work done for free via Debian. Putting the firmwares back in and skinning the product isnt going to take that much that Debian hasn't already done.

Debian is my favorite distro but they are a bit millitantly free on occasion making the product harder to use than it sometimes needs to be to fall in line with the DFSG.

This is why it pains me to use Ubuntu but crap like this makes Debian worth it.

Probaby came out like a troll or flame. Such is life.

Re:Honestly not that bad

[adosch]

It really isn't. I mean come on, a distro as large as Ubuntu is gonna need revenue from places other than donations. And, as long as it isn't too obtrusive in the UI, I won't really complain about it. Besides, there's always other flavors of Ubuntu which may have the ad feature removed.

Bah, don't try to console the masses with the it-won't-be-so-bad speech.

If there's a need for revenue then start doing subscriptions and tier off your desktop builds then with "innovative" feature sets that are specific and elegant to a UI experience.

Ad's piss people off and IMHO they will just drive people to build package sets an cust repos that rid the ads or just find Ubuntu alternatives. Shame on you, Ubuntu.

Re:Honestly not that bad

[TechieRefugee]

Like I said, as long as it doesn't get too obtrusive (i.e forcing you to sit through ads before the computer even boots to the desktop), then I won't complain too much. Besides, the software is still free, so why are people complaining? As far as the last comment, of course some are gonna find ways of getting rid of ads. Why else would AdBlockPlus be such a popular plugin for browsers?

Re:Honestly not that bad

[KugelKurt]

It really isn't. I mean come on, a distro as large as Ubuntu is gonna need revenue from places other than donations.

Canonical wants to generate from Unity to develop Unity and nothing else. Canonical simply has no programmers who develop drivers like Red Hat has. Red Hat (and SUSE and so on) develop software that benefits the entire ecosystem, including Ubuntu. Unity OTOH is written in a way to make porting to other Linux flavors as difficult as possible.
I am also sure that this these ads are why Canonical demands signing a CLA from outside Unity contributors. The CLA allows that Canonical can produce closed source variants of Unity. How long now 'till we see OEM variants of Ubuntu with non-removable ads?

Sure, Canonical has the legal and moral right to do so, but I prefer Red Hat's approach without any attempt at vendor lock-in and without revenue generation at the expense of community-based FOSS projects (as Canonical did by modifying a Banshee plugin).

Re:Honestly not that bad

[Nerdfest]

The biggest deal for me is that ads are quite a large exploit vector. I block ads in my browser because I consider them to be from an untrusted source. If these are simply text and PNG, then perhaps it's not so bad.

Re:Honestly not that bad

[AaronMK]

Besides, the software is still free, so why are people complaining?

ad supported != free

In general, operating systems are more becoming more walled gardens for the vendor's "store" and designed around "affiliated" experiences rather than actual pieces of software that make it easy for the user to install and use the software and services of their choosing. "Free" or not, Ubuntu going down this slope reflects this frustrating trend.

Re:Honestly not that bad

[Nursie]

I know it's no longer fashionable to bitch about pulseaudio, but...

Any time anything goes wrong wit linux audio, it seems to be because pulse has been brought in by some package dependency, and it's screwed something up. Flash can't play sound at the same time as another program? Pulse. Sound dies after a while for no reason? Pulse.

Now, I'm sure that in many cases the problem is other programs and their sound support being buggy or just rong, but in pretty much all cases I've encountered, ditching pulse and dropping back to ALSA gives me a more functional system.

Re:Honestly not that bad

[eugene ts wong]

Honestly, I don't know what is wrong. I tried to record sound a year or 2 ago, and there still seems to be a complaint or 2 on Slashdot. I tried to search for information and everything. I seem to recall that my was working, but the software just wouldn't record it. Also, I vaguely remember needing to configure it. I'm still using 10.04 or something.

I hate to be so vague. I'm just upset that the community always seems to need to reconfigure sound cards.

Re:Honestly not that bad

[Crispy Critters]

It often works fine as long as you only use your computer the way that Lennart wants you to (single user at a desktop running Gnome). If you have different ideas, the setup can be difficult and poorly documented. It's very good at stopping flash from locking up the audio, which is the main reason I keep using it on some computers.

Re:Honestly not that bad

[Cinder6]

A few years ago, there were rumors Apple was going to have ads on OS X. There was huge amounts of ridicule and scorn on this site (and rightfully so!). With this article, there's a surprising amount of ambivalence and even acceptance. Whither the complaints, Slashdot? Or is this not a case of hypocrisy and merely the reflection of changing attitudes?

Re:Honestly not that bad

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

And, as long as it isn't too obtrusive in the UI,

surely you mean, "as long as I can easily uninstall it"? I'm not one to complain about Canonical trying to generate revenue, and I'd leave the ads there initially, but if they annoy me, I want to option to easily remove them. Otherwise... new distro!

Re:Honestly not that bad

[jbicha]

Um, copyright means that you can make closed source versions because it's your stuff and you own it. This isn't news, it affects a lot more software than just Unity, and it's nothing to be afraid of.

Re:Honestly not that bad

[Raenex]

Then they should do the one thing that actually turns a profit for free software vendors: subscriptions (for e.g. support, updates, etc.), targeting business users.

They do that already.

Re:Honestly not that bad

[lightknight]

I imagine /.'s demographic has changed. One need only remember /. radio, and how the founders of /. where making fun of another distro for attempting to put ads into the bootloader...something like "This boot brought to you by Amazon!"

Re:Honestly not that bad

[oldredlion]

If you're having problems recording a playing audio stream, have a look at this page

http://www.ubuntugeek.com/how-to-recording-internal-audio-in-ubuntu.html

Re:Honestly not that bad

[icebraining]

It's neither "yours" nor you "own" it. You have a government granted monopoly for its distribution.

Re:Honestly not that bad

[X0563511]

Deluge of bug reports voting to delete the ad package in 3... 2... 1...

Re:Honestly not that bad

[TheGreatOrangePeel]

While it is true that ads result in affiliate revenue, it isn't always true that affiliate revenue means that you're seeing ads. My point is that calling it "ad revenue" is likely a misnomer in this case. To me it sounds like all they're doing is placing a links to Amazon in the menu which has a GET parameter get buys them a wimpy 5% cut of whatever it is you're buying. I'll gladly click an Amazon icon; it means that I'm supporting Ubuntu with no money out-of-pocket.

Re:Honestly not that bad

[grumling]

OK, if they need money why not charge us $10 to use it? $10 is hardly a hardship for most of the world, and if it is, maybe set up a fund for "the 1%" to donate registration fees for the people who can't afford it. Might even improve loyalty, since instead of the cost of burning a CD, it's now the cost of a CD and $10. You paid for it, you might as well use it.

Much better than trying to come up with some screwy ad system.

Re:Honestly not that bad

[Randle_Revar]

> Flash can't play sound at the same time as another program? Pulse. Sound dies after a while for no reason? Pulse.
Wrong, those are exactly the problems PA fixes.

Re:Honestly not that bad

[squiggleslash]

Are you reading the same Slashdot I am? Because the only comments I'm reading that aren't scorning the idea are those from people who want to devote their comments to Unity and how much that sucks instead.

And speaking for myself... I have no objection to Ubuntu shipping with an Amazon store of some kind, but ads is another thing. I'll use 12.04 for as long as necessary, and switch to Mint in the long term, if that happens.

I've stuck with Ubuntu for a while. I'm ambivalent about Unity, largely because I respect what they're trying to do but feel the UI just isn't there yet, and because, in terms of my own workflow, I actually get a better desktop because of their work (GNOME 3 with Unity's menu system and some other widgets actually works well for me.)

I want to upgrade, because there are issues in 12.04. The system doesn't fully support MTP for example, meaning I need to install hacky, barely working, packages just to transfer files from my Galaxy Nexus. I was looking forward to an upgrade, albeit with some concern that the GNOME+Unity mixture might finally break with this release.

Ads? No, that's the last straw. I'm happy with all kinds of revenue streams, even the infamous "swapping in Canonical's affiliate id into Banshee" incident. But I'm tired of every two bit marketer out there refusing to accept that at some point they have to ask for money, and insisting - INSISTING - that ads be foisted upon their users instead, especially in an era where advertisers are either clueless, or sociopathic, and think nothing of transmitting a highbandwidth presentation with audio without warning to their hapless victims.

Now, I should add this: yes, I understand Canonical is grasping around at the moment trying to find something that works. The cloud storage thing was probably looking good until Google and Apple jumped into that realm. The music store, well, maybe not so much as Amazon's been there from the start with a superb MP3 store. But you have to at least work from the premise of being rewarded for adding value. When your chosen revenue generator removes value, users go elsewhere. And especially in an open source environment, you're fooling yourself if you think you can remove value and get away with it. Mint exists because many Ubuntu users perceived Canonical as removing value from Ubuntu by moving away from GNOME 2. If Mint didn't already exist, putting ads in Ubuntu would result in its creation tomorrow morning.

Re:Honestly not that bad

[Osgeld]

They would need less ad revenue if they didnt constantly shit on, and drive away their users.

Re:Honestly not that bad

[Osgeld]

in fairness your not paying (at the time) 130$+ for the privlage of ad's, Ubuntu is still a free OS, and personally this smells a little desperate, as they have caused a mass exodus on their own product with this whole unity lets make it pretty, but mostly useless tablet OS with bugs that date back to v8

Re:Honestly not that bad

[Electricity Likes Me]

PulseAudio is IMO a great idea which has suffered from implementation problems and a bad UI design.

The idea is spectacular since it's so fundamental - applications emit sound, PulseAudio sends it to sound renderers, and these things can be anywhere you want.

The problem at the moment is we lack any fully-feature userspace applications to truly make that happen and seem obviously beneficial, so all we perceive is the downside (implementation problems).

Re:Honestly not that bad

[Compaqt]

Well, on the one hand, you've got a company giving away software for free. Ads are undesired, but perhaps there's no other way.

On the other hand, you've got a got a company that has a tenth of a trillion dollars in the bank. Putting ads on top of that is just unseemly and greedy.

Re:Honestly not that bad

[Nursie]

No.

Those are exactly the problems PA is supposed to fix. It does not.

They are problems it has caused on my systems over the last 2ish years. As I said, I don't necessarily blame PA, it may well be other software that is buggy and causes the issues BUT all problems go away as soon as I go back to ALSA. Sorry if that offends you, it's just the way it is for me.

Re:Honestly not that bad

[Threni]

It's not that bad, because it'll just complete the exodus of users over to Linux Mint that started with the ridiculous Unity experiment.

Linux Mint's slogan should be "Ubuntu...without the bullshit".

Re:Honestly not that bad

[eric_herm]

s/do that/try to do that/

I am doubtful that most people pay Canonical for anything, since, you know, that's free and there is lots of cheaper and smaller shop to make support about Ubuntu (and also bigger shop).

Re:Honestly not that bad

[DerPflanz]

Just a quick note about the MTP issue, install AirDroid on your phone and you are done with the cable hassle.

Re:Honestly not that bad

[Knuckles]

apt-get remove unity-shopping-lens, done.

Re:Honestly not that bad

[Knuckles]

apt-get remove unity-shopping-lense

Re:Honestly not that bad

[galanom]

And, as long as it isn't too obtrusive in the UI, I won't really complain about it.

A single pixel, bit or char with an advertisement is IMMENSELY obtrusive to me.
Ads in an OS? Really? Why not spam also? Probably they would make a partnership with YouPorn, why not?

Re:Honestly not that bad

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

apt-get remove unity-shopping-lense

That's nice and simple really.... so I guess I have no problem with this! Cheers!! :D

Re:Honestly not that bad

[Knuckles]

Glad I could help. Actually I made a typo, it's "unity-lens-shopping", which makes more sense anyway. In addition, configuration options will be added, see today's blog post about the Amazon feature by Shuttleworth: http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1182

It's a bit of a PR disaster that this blog post comes after the feature landed in the Beta. If Shuttleworth had published this in advance, many of the misunderstandings which fueled this Slashdot discussion could have been avoided.

Re:Honestly not that bad

[squiggleslash]

Thanks. Nice idea by the developers but it needs a little work - I can't download all my pictures for example (I just get an empty Zip file, and selecting each manually would take hours...)

You know, none of this would be necessary if Android had proper Bluetooth file transfer support...

Re:Honestly not that bad

[DerPflanz]

I had the same issue just now. Looks like a bug in the media folder. When downloading through "Files" it does work correctly.

Re:Honestly not that bad

[eugene ts wong]

Hi. Thanks for the suggestion.

That page's instructions didn't work for me, because I'm using Kubuntu, and that is for Ubuntu. I decided to search around a bit, since there might be more documentation written after I last looked. It turns out that there is some.
Lucid Lynx 10.04 and Maverick Meerkat 10.10 which is for Ubuntu, but it works for me.

Now I just need to get something to record via the internal microphone.

Enough Microsoft!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm switching to Linux... oh wait

Re:Enough Microsoft!

[Ol Biscuitbarrel]

What surprised me from reading TFS was that Ubuntu only has 12.10 users.

Re:Enough Microsoft!

[Dogtanian]

What surprised me from reading TFS was that Ubuntu only has 12.10 users.

What worries *me* is the ".10" of a user in there :-O

Re:Enough Microsoft!

[BonquiquiShiquavius]

That's so offensive! They're called "Little People". Not "0.10's"

Is it only in Unity?

[YukariHirai]

If it's only in Unity and not KDE, then I'm a bit disappointed in Canonical, but not especially upset.

If it is in KDE too, that might just be what makes me abandon ship.

Re:Is it only in Unity?

[Anonymous Coward]

Those bastards at Ubuntu are trying to pay their employees again, I hope they burn in hell for trying to make a tiny profit off of me without any negative effect on my end.

Re:Is it only in Unity?

[couchslug]

It's Linux.

You can disable any adverts easily, and run the WM of your choice WITHOUT switching distros.

You aren't stuck with defaults as you are with Windows.

Re:Is it only in Unity?

[msclrhd]

The GPL does not forbid you from (a) selling your software, or (b) making a profit from it. The GPL requires you to release the source code for your product. For example, selling your GPL game with protected assets (art, music, etc.) but open code is fine. Also, RedHat and others make money from supporting their distros/software.

Re:Is it only in Unity?

[realityimpaired]

You might want to follow your own advice... there's nothing in the GPL which says you can't profit from it, nor that you are even discouraged from trying to profit from it, and there are a *lot* of distros that *do* turn a profit in one way or another. That's without even considering software companies like Crossover or Cedega or PlayOnLinux. Pretty much every Linux developer profits from it in some way, if not directly then from being able to put it on their resume, or from job opportunities that arise through contacts they make in the community, or from keeping their skills up while they work on different projects. Even big name companies that pay people specifically to develop for Linux make a profit out of it... thanks to better Linux support, I went from being a rabid AMD fangirl to buying nothing but Intel in my systems, and NVidia graphics for gaming systems, and I'm not the only one.

Besides that, Canonical has been selling support contracts for years. What's new is using an ad-supported model, but even that isn't completely new in Linux, and has been done by others. And you know what? It costs money to keep a server going, and they get a lot of downloads. If they are not making enough from donations to stay afloat, then they have every right to try to monetize in other ways. It sure as hell wouldn't be the first time... you know that both Firefox and Ubuntu get money from Google every time you open your browser to the default searchpage? That's their decision to make, and if you have a problem with it you can switch to somebody else, or try giving them money so they don't have to advertise.

Re:Is it only in Unity?

[spire3661]

But why, after this, would i want to? We want LESS advertising, not for every connected device to shove ads at us.

Re:Is it only in Unity?

[Deathlizard]

True, but when there's other Distros out there offering a similar or better experience without ads, why stay? I don't want to see Linux Distro's go down the same path as most of the Microsoft PC vendors have gone down

I don't use Linux, I use Windows, but it irritates me that I can't buy a Windows Laptop today without first uninstalling half of the useless AdWare/TrialWare/CrapWare/ETC that vendors stick on it. It's gotten so bad on the windows side that Microsoft had to make a clean PC A Certified Brand! as a selling point just to try to get it under control.

Re:Is it only in Unity?

[unixisc]

Actually, it does - by insisting on the 'Help your neighbor' 'Freedom #2' of the GNU. In other words, if you write any GPL software and sell it, you can NOT prevent your customer from re-selling or re-distributing it to others. In fact, Canonical violates the re-selling part of this deal, and is blacklisted by the FSF for that very reason.

That clause alone caps any market for any GPLed products. On /., there was once a discussion on a company who sold its GPL product w/ a support license, but had a clause that if the customer exercised Freedom #2, the support license would be forfeited. This raised some eyebrows in the FSF, but they couldn't do squat about it. I doubt that even GPL3 gets around it.

BSD at least doesn't prevent its code from being combined w/ non BSD code. So if you wanted to make use of BSD software, you could incorporate it into a larger package that does not support the copyleft, and you can put any restrictions you want. Heck, Apple does just that in OS-X and iOS. But there is no way they could have done it w/ GPL.

Re:Is it only in Unity?

[couchslug]

" I use Windows, but it irritates me that I can't buy a Windows Laptop today without first uninstalling half of the useless AdWare/TrialWare/CrapWare/ETC that vendors stick on it."

I'll do what's convenient for me because it's all about me.

In your Windows use case, a clean install promptly finds its way onto my machine and not a single fuck is given.

I understand their need to make a buck, but they can do that off the "slowest zebra".

Re:Is it only in Unity?

[couchslug]

I don't know about you, but I WANT FREE STUFF.

I want it without strings attached, or with strings so easy to CUT that I can do that while SOMEONE ELSE pays for my FREE STUFF.

For example, I use free webmail accounts, but interact with them using Thunderbird (Linux) and Thunderbird Portable (Windows).

No annoying Yahoo or Gmail web pages or content. My messages and contacts are archived offline so if either provider dies I can just add a new one and move seemlessly forward.

Hard-copy example:
Junk mail funds the Post Office. I can throw it away. Beats paying more for postage.

So long

[iamwhoiamtoday]

and thanks for all the fish.

Bye Fubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been a pleasure, but the ride is over. Hello Gentoo, and Fedora. I'm starting to see why people pay for Windows and OSX now. Might get myself a copy of Windows 7.

Profit!

[Fished]

1. Build a free operating system.
2. Support it for years.
3. ... have Amazon "affiliate" ads ...
4. Profit!

We've finally found out what the '...' stood for. Look for a fork of Ubuntu in 5 ... 4... 3...

Re:Profit!

[Samantha Wright]

I don't want to scare you, but there are already dozens of those.

Re:Profit!

[JaredOfEuropa]

If you build a free OS and support it for years, I think you're entitled to a little profit. Besides, a single command will get rid of the ads.

Re:Profit!

[rubycodez]

why put up witht the crappy UI? a single distro switch will get rid of all the Canonical cruft. fuck 'em.

Re:Profit!

[Anonymous Coward]

If you build a free OS and support it for years, I think you're entitled to a little profit.

They didn't "build" a free OS. They took a free OS that other people had built (Debian), forked it, ditched the slow-but-stable upgrade approach in favor of bleeding-edge instability, and slapped some cute branding on there.

The only things Canonical has "built" are crapware like Unity, that brilliant attempt to force a netbook-oriented interface on desktop users just after the entire Linux netbook market collapsed under pressure from Microsoft and Apple.

Re:Profit!

[Fished]

Didn't say they weren't. Was just trying to be funny (perhaps unsuccsesfully.)

Easily disabled

[drinkypoo]

I too am offended to be getting advertisements by default. But thankfully, they are trivial to remove. FTFA,

Removing Shopping Results from Unity

Much like the Amazon and Ubuntu One Music web-apps you can disable the âShoppingâ(TM) feature easily.

Just open up a terminal and run:

        sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping

Re:Easily disabled

[Anonymous Coward]

Just open up a terminal? My grandma is not going to "just open up a terminal". That doesn't count as "trivial to remove", sorry.

Re:Easily disabled

[Anonymous Coward]

Your grandma also doesn't care if these ads exist.

Re:Easily disabled

[jamstar7]

I'm a grandfather and I run Linux, you insensitive clot!!!!!!!!!!!!

And I ain't foolin', either!

Re:Easily disabled

[PixetaledPikachu]

Just open up a terminal? My grandma is not going to "just open up a terminal". That doesn't count as "trivial to remove", sorry.

Did your grandma install her ubuntu box? No? Then just ask whoever installed it to do it, right after the OS setup process

Re:Easily disabled

[The Infamous Grimace]

It might be 'easily' removed by someone who's comfortable opening a terminal window, but not necessarily the average user. As a distro that prides itself on ease-of-use I hope they provide an easier method than this, like a pref setting or manager app.

Re:Easily disabled

[jedidiah]

It really depends.

Is she a helpless ninny or not? Some people are just beyond hope. If they can't be bothered to open a terminal then they are probably hopeless regardless of what OS you're using.

I know a 90 year old "great grandma" that would have no problems executing any well documented recipe you gave her.

HER daughter is a helpless ninny.

It's not necessarily an age thing.

Re:Easily disabled

[Anonymous Coward]

Just use one of the available graphical package managers.

If Ubuntu still has it open synaptic, enter "shopping" in the search field, right-click on unity-lens-shopping, select remove package and then click on apply changes. should be possible with other GUIs as well - some just hide several software types by default (libraries and background services).

Re:Easily disabled

[Tubal-Cain]

Email a shell script. After that you're just down to the 45-minute "Download and double click" walkthough.

Re:Easily disabled

[drinkypoo]

Just open up a terminal? My grandma is not going to "just open up a terminal". That doesn't count as "trivial to remove", sorry.

You almost had me, but everyone knows that anonymous cowards don't have parents.

Seriously though, if you didn't set up your Grandma's machine to be remotely administered by you when you installed it, then you probably aren't qualified to be using slashdot. Or a web browser. Or a computer. Or your thumbs. You log in remotely, you run the command, the problem goes away. Also, if your grandmother can't click the terminal, copy and paste the command, and answer yes to any prompts, then she probably shouldn't have Ubuntu. She should probably have Android, or even iOS. She needs her hand held. There's nothing wrong with that, and it should be accounted for. How do you think this theoretical grandmother (since we've already established that you don't have one, since there is no you) would react to Windows crapware? You think she could figure out how to remove programs from Windows 7 or 8? You think she could manage to uninstall the right thing? Give it a rest.

Re:Easily disabled

[Yfrwlf]

But your grandma got Linux because of you, and you shouldn't recommend spyware or adware to anyone.

Re:Easily disabled

[digitalderbs]

Thereby disadvantaging the non-technical user once again.

Re:Easily disabled

[Yfrwlf]

You forgot the other ones. You need to remove the video and music lenses which pull info from YouTube, Google, and others, otherwise you will be querying those businesses even if you are just trying to search your own computer for content. It's a form of spyware.

Also having to remove crapware you don't want after you install something was an often-heard compaint about Windows. I'd rather not have it be on Linux now too.

Canonical: You're getting your morals turned around. Community should come before money. Forget what the spirit of Ubuntu was supposed to represent?

Re:Easily disabled

[Chemisor]

You forgot the other lenses and scopes, which also bring up external search results. So instead, open a terminal window and type:

% sudo dpkg --list |grep "lens" | awk '{print $2}' | xargs sudo apt-get remove
% sudo dpkg --list |grep "scope" | awk '{print $2}' | xargs sudo apt-get remove

See? Easy as pie. Absolutely anybody ought to be able to do this. Ubuntu is not like Windows where users are assumed to be incompetent morons. On Ubuntu, every user is smart, skilled, and infinitely patient. It's paradise, really.

Re:Easily disabled

[drinkypoo]

As a distro that prides itself on ease-of-use I hope they provide an easier method than this, like a pref setting or manager app.

It's called software center. You search it for amazon.

Re:Easily disabled

[TheGratefulNet]

"apt-get remove --purge"

if its worth removing, its worth fully removing ;)

Re:Easily disabled

[History's Coming To]

You do realise UNIX was written by people who are now mostly grandparents? Hell, Torvalds is old enough to be a grandparent.

Re:Easily disabled

[mounthood]

Canonical: You're getting your morals turned around. Community should come before money. Forget what the spirit of Ubuntu was supposed to represent?

Imagine they had said: you can help support developers by installing these apps. Oh well, Xubuntu 12.04 is LTS.

Re:Easily disabled

[skine]

Sure, they're easy to remove, but it's one more thing you need to fix every six months.

Re:Easily disabled

[Yfrwlf]

I do not help developers by offering to be spied upon, and at least then I would have a choice. The way it is now I have to do something proactive to protect myself. Simply moving to another distro is all that isn't *buntu.

Re:Easily disabled

[squiggleslash]

She will if she has to pay for them.

My mother (who now counts as a grandmother) has Internet access largely because of the ease and cost of setting up a prepaid wireless broadband connection. If she were limited to DSL and Cable, she'd probably not have it set up given her particular circumstances.

Re:Easily disabled

[Yfrwlf]

There is no clear separation. When I do "quick searches" for private documents on my computer, I want to know that it is a search only on my computer. It's not in a "search online" lens, it's doing it in "search movies" and "search music". If you want to be data mined though, be my guest.

Re:Easily disabled

[squiggleslash]

I see what you did there...

Re:Easily disabled

[Osgeld]

so is not installing ubuntu in the first place

honestly its now easier to start with a base debian system and build up than it is to install Ubuntu and disable / remove all of its bullshit

Re:Easily disabled

[Yfrwlf]

You can make money via paid development/support and other ways. You can have morals and have a business at the same time, it is possible.

Re:Easily disabled

[big_e_1977]

% sudo dpkg --list |grep -E "lens|scope" | awk '{print $2}' | xargs sudo apt-get remove

It's actually 50% easier than you thought. Now its so easy my dog can do it.

Re:Easily disabled

[Microlith]

Community should come before money.

Yeah, they should just go broke rather than find a way to generate income and keep this thing going.

Re:Easily disabled

[gl4ss]

well, two things.

first: doesn't apple have this billion dollar patent on this searching both internet and local computer at one go? not that it matters.
second: yeah It's kinda crappy to send all queries to canonical, and further to google amazon & all.

least they could notice people when they're sending it.. but that would creep people out. but what's really shitty is that they promoted the shitty unity interface to get everyone to do all their searches through the one unified box maximizing the effect of this. shithouse linux sucks as always.

Re:Easily disabled

[drinkypoo]

Nothing involving an awk script should ever be described as "easy as pie".

You can probably use cut -d' ' -f2, but I haven't checked.

Have you ever made pie? Making pie is easy. Making good pie is not so easy. Most of it is a cinch. Then comes the crust.

Re:Easily disabled

[Yfrwlf]

I know of some ways, and they don't involve spying on users. How about offering installation and development services for two?

Re:Easily disabled

[Yfrwlf]

At least if it gets bad someone can release a bundle without those included, or better yet an easy privacy option to enable/disable them, the way it should have been to begin with. I suggested it in the Ubuntu forums but that didn't go over very well.

Re:Easily disabled

[Compaqt]

Why bother running apt?

sudo rm -Rf /

Re:Easily disabled

[Yfrwlf]

Morals take a backseat to food and shelter. Devs have to eat, they can't work for free

lol, says the CEOs of the oil industry. Great excuse, but there are other solutions that don't sacrifice morals.

Re:Easily disabled

[History's Coming To]

OSX is UNIX. It has a certificate to say so and everything.

Re:Easily disabled

[cinky]

> Seriously though, if you didn't set up your Grandma's machine to be remotely administered by you when you installed it, then you probably aren't qualified to be using slashdot. yes because my time is abundant and I can take care of a wide network of computers for friends and family... I'm always thrilled when I see the linux crowd oscillating from "it's for everyone" to "but not so much". > Windows crapware But I remove the crapware at the beginning, give her limited user rights and am set... The crapware on windows computers is usually "value-ware" from the manufacturer of the computer. Clear install of windows 7/8 has no crapware and mainly, windows DOESN'T install crapware as part of a regular system update...

Re:Easily disabled

[couchslug]

"On Ubuntu, every user is smart, skilled, and infinitely patient. It's paradise, really."

On Linux, every user has access to the hive mind where answers like the one you posted are readily available.

Re:Easily disabled

[unixisc]

Dunno about Torvalds, but yeah, the original Unix devs are pretty old. Heck, Dennis Ritchie passed away recently. So we're really talking about their contemporaries, and they ought to be good not just @ bash, but also ash, sh, csh, dsh....zsh.

Re:Easily disabled

[Yfrwlf]

Lol, they "need money" only if they come up with a business model that is moral, otherwise they can find other jobs. If they are going to data mine users, at the very least they need to build in options for easily opting into that instead of forcing that onto users.

Re:Easily disabled

[servant]

OR let me put MY affiliate ID in replacing Connonical! coatclos-20 is my preffered affiliate ID!

HA HA

[Internal Modem]

HA HA!

I'd prefer to pay

[pr0nbot]

I've enjoyed using Ubuntu. It was the first Linux distro that "just worked" for me (by which I mean, wifi/video/audio worked out of the box). And it's free!

I don't know what kind of ARPU they expect from this, but as an Ubuntu user I'd prefer to just pay. A freemium model would do, maybe something like "get the previous LTS version for free, get the current one for $X". Or "donate to enable advanced features" or something. But peppering my work/leisure environment with third-party advertisements (i.e. spyware and probably malware at some point)? No thanks.

Re:I'd prefer to pay

[CalcProgrammer1]

Pay? Screw that crap! I started using Ubuntu because it worked, it was free, and it supported the ideals of open-source, community-driven development. The original design of Ubuntu's philosophy was user-focused, that "Ubuntu will *ALWAYS* be free", etc. I don't really give a crap how much they provide/do/support/whatever, when you screw over your users after promising something you can't achieve, it's your face in the mud and everyone else moves on to the next distro. I'm not letting those freaks get away with screwing over their userbase and will be moving to Mint unless there are extreme circumstances (and the ability to remove the ads before they are allowed to display).

Re:I'd prefer to pay

[unixisc]

So are you willing to pay for Mint if they were to say, from a given point, pay us $15 or else fehgeddaboudit?

It's a small price to pay

[dgharmon]

It's a small price to pay for such a well polished distro ...

This is not good

[baalzebub]

So, is this why they insisted so much on Unity? Fuck that.

Didn't everyone move to Mint?

[jlbprof]

Over the inflexible desktop user interface. Now it's official.

Re:Didn't everyone move to Mint?

[rubycodez]

oh yes.

Mint offers xfce, cinnamon, MATE, and KDE variations of the ubuntu-based edition. And they also have Linux Mint Debian Edition with MATE, cinnamon or xfce. And of course many other desktop managers you could install if you don't like those......

Re:Didn't everyone move to Mint?

[rubycodez]

no, people with brains who want to use more than one app at a time want the mature time-tested UI model with ever more features evolving over time to make it useful added on. We have such evolving desktop UIs in the Mint supported desktiops. Your Unity is the single-tasked MS-DOS window that panders to 'tards. No one I know likes it, even those staying with Ubuntu use the Xubuntu.

Re:Didn't everyone move to Mint?

[Gordonjcp]

Single-tasking? So, am I somehow imagining that I have a couple of terminals open with IRC in one, a compiler going in another, an editor, a web browser and a window for the project I'm hacking on?

Maybe you're confused by the way you can't see all the windows at the same time. Now, I'm fairly sure that most animals can figure out that just because something is hidden behind another thing, it doesn't mean it's not there - most dogs can work out that if they look *behind* the box, they'll find the biscuit you hid there - but it appears that a lot of computer users cannot make this intellectual leap.

Or are you saying that Ruby coders aren't quite as intelligent as the average dog?

Re:Didn't everyone move to Mint?

[Osgeld]

its a matter of how you work, like peoples real desk, I keep things somewhat tidy and in place so when I need them its a simple action, much like clicking a taskbar item, you sound like the guy next to me, who is perfectly happy to have a pile of shit on his desk and when he has to write a note it all gets shoved to the side just so he can find his pencil, much like gnome 3

"Or are you saying that Ruby coders aren't quite as intelligent as the average dog?"

heh I almost took the bait

The headline sounded bad, but they did it well.

[raymorris]

I groaned when I read the headline, picturing permanent banner ads on the desktop. When I TFA, I saw they did a goof job of it. An unobtrusive maybe even useful, way for non-coders to contribute a just a little bit to Ubuntu development. I do continue code, weekly, but still I wouldn't mind those types of carefully integrated search results too much.

Re:The headline sounded bad, but they did it well.

[melikamp]

If advertisers don't pay you already, they should!

Dash

[Halo1]

Ubuntu 12.10 now includes both Amazon ads in the user's dash

I hope I'm not the only one that got visions of a /etc/profile spewing out Amazon commercials when reading the above.

Re:Dash

[unixisc]

/etc can be moved to /amazon/etc from Ubuntu 12.10. Similarly, there will be only one folder & file in / - which will be /amazon/, and everything else will be below it. /amazon/etc, /amazon/usr, /amazon/bin and so on. Even vm-linuz will be under /amazon/ ;-)

But are the 'users' becoming products?

[overshoot]

Here's a hint: if you're not paying for it, you are the product.

This has very obviously been Microsoft's business model for operating systems from the very beginning: they don't sell the OS to you, they sell you to the OEMs.

Re:But are the 'users' becoming products?

[betterunixthanunix]

Here's a hint: if you're not paying for it, you are the product.

I do not pay for this:

https://www.scientificlinux.org/

Somehow, I do not think that Fermilab or CERN view me as the product.

Re:But are the 'users' becoming products?

[ae1294]

Somehow, I do not think that Fermilab or CERN view me as the product.

Surely not! Now If you would be so kind as to climb up and start the rotors we can bring the anti - mass spectrometer to 80%.

Re:But are the 'users' becoming products?

[wvmarle]

CERN and Fermilab want a linux distro that's tailored to their needs, so they create one. They pay for that, just like most companies do for their software (by buying Windows, or Red Hat, or Suse, or whatnot). Bigger companies pay for their software even more by hiring an IT department.

SL goes a little further, creating their own OS. And because they're nice (and scientists like to be nice and share their ideas usually), and because it doesn't cost them much if anything extra, they allow the world to get a copy of their software and use it as they like.

They don't care if they make money out of that, because they build it for a totally different reason. They have an itch, and scratch it, that's all. As soon as that itch they have with commercial products is gone they may just as well drop SL altogether.

Re:But are the 'users' becoming products?

[DogDude]

Say what you will about MS, but I've *never*, in 20 years, seen an ad in a MS product that was from Microsoft. OEM's slapping crap in top is very different than MS putting ads in their own products.

Re:But are the 'users' becoming products?

[overshoot]

Say what you will about MS, but I've *never*, in 20 years, seen an ad in a MS product that was from Microsoft.

You mean, aside from cross-advertising? (E.g. nagging Office users about the wonders of Sharepoint.)

No, the MS operating system business works differently: MS has a honking ginormous captive user base. OEMs can't survive without access to that user base, thus they have to buy access to it from Microsoft. MS sells users (that means you!) to the OEMs. So you don't pay for the operating system, but are instead the "product" that MS sells to others.

Re:But are the 'users' becoming products?

[DogDude]

I understand that. I can uninstall the crapware or just wipe the drive and install a fresh copy of Windows whatever. It's not inherent to the OS, which is wildly, totally inappropriate. Ubuntu has jumped the shark on this one.

Re:But are the 'users' becoming products?

[pantherace]

Windows Live Messenger.

Also, no way to disable it aside from blocking the ad at the bottom. I had to install that specifically for a particular job.

Re:But are the 'users' becoming products?

[ceoyoyo]

You're right. The statement should be amended: "if you're not paying for it, you are either the product, or nothing."

Scientific Linux is a linux distribution that's made for a specific group of people (who DO pay for it, possibly indirectly). Because they're nice people, they let you download it too. But you're not the customer and they don't owe you anything. You're nothing.

Re:But are the 'users' becoming products?

[unixisc]

Yeah, they got a Linux distro @ a cost, made a derivative product out of it for their own, in-house use, and didn't mind sharing it when they were done. Proliferating SL was the last thing on their mind - in fact, they made it available all right, but the main reason they made it was for themselves. So they have no accountability to anybody but themselves for how it turns out, but the larger scientific community worldwide likes to share that.

Completely different from Red Hat, Canonical, Mandriva, Debian, and all the rest. Those people get paid by the EU/their governments, and so income is not an issue for them. Neither is making the OS their main job - SL is just their tool, which they happily share w/ others. By all means, use it, if it serves your purposes - it's not exactly made for Libre-Office, or checking out YouTube or any of those things that normal desktop users do.

Re:But are the 'users' becoming products?

[unixisc]

If somebody who's using SL is sitting in the US, Canada, Australia, Japan or other non European countries, no their taxes did not pay for it. It's unknown how much of the work into this comes from CERN/Fermilabs, and how much from other universities worldwide.

hi debian

[dasacc22]

Wow, glad I just finished setting up Debian testing on my new x230 and migrated to Debian stable on a personal server I while back after the uefi bit. Ubuntu got me into Debian and away from slack and gen too from way back. Been good Ubuntu, bye.

Re:hi debian

[rubycodez]

Ubuntu was great for desktop, till they ruined it with Unity. I never considered Ubuntu good enough for server like Debian

only thing better than Debian for stability and testing, is a BSD

Re:hi debian

[tomhath]

I prefer Debian anyway. Never understood what was better about Ubuntu - bloated and ugly

Re:hi debian

[unixisc]

Of which Debian too, has a port - at least for kFreeBSD. Hopefully, instead of gnu tools, they'll embrace BSD tools, like Clang/LLVM, and come up w/ a new suite of BSDL based s/w

Mandriva tried it

[betterunixthanunix]

Mandriva tried that, and it didn't really work out for them. Really, software is best monetized with subscriptions (e.g. RHEL), but I do not think Ubuntu's users will be willing to pay for subscriptions.

Re:Mandriva tried it

[Richard_J_N]

Yes... but Mandriva did it *really* badly. You could pay, but only $60 (nothing less). And for that sum, one got a DVD and printed packaging, shipped internationally 3 weeks after the release. So I was spending $60, knowing that $30 was going completely to waste on costs, for a useless DVD and shipping. I'd have been much happier to donate $20 each time, with the aim of "we'll support you in order to keep the service free for those who need it".

Re:Apple does this

[goodmanj]

"Apple does this. At least they did from my brief exposure to them. Built right into the main file menu."

Anybody know what this anonymous coward is on about? I've used Macs since 1989, and I have no idea what he's referring to.

Re:Adbuntu

[Knuckles]

I wonder how long until someone releases a tool to disable the ads.

Big deal. sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping. Or for the GUI, open Ubuntu Software Center, search for, e.g., "shop". Click "Show technical items" and uninstall the lens. That could be made a bit more obvious, but it's not like what you are implying.

The users have become the product.

[QuietLagoon]

But are the 'users' becoming products?

More specifically, the attention of the users has become the product being sold. Similar to magazine subscriptions, the object is to profit off the attention of the user (reader).

Re:The users have become the product.

[lightknight]

Extraordinary that we've progressed so far (technologically speaking), but our methods of funding things are still stuck in the 1800s.

Canonical should offer a page, with various possible enhancements, and funding targets. Accept BitCoin, PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, and so forth, and begin work on the project when the funding target is met. This way end users can steer development into areas that they actually would like developed.

Re:The users have become the product.

[Zadaz]

But are the 'users' becoming products?

Becoming? They always were.

Repeat this until it sticks in your head: If you're not paying for it you're the product not the customer.

Re:Linux land of the ads

[Anonymous Coward]

except for other Microsoft products or upgrades

Unfortunatly needed

[houghi]

If people want Linux for the Desktop, having it re-installed is the only way. PC sellers are willing to sell their PCs with any OS on it, as long as they make money.

The margins on hardware are minimal, so they look at extra income. Anti-virus programs are a nice source of income. So if they can generate extra income from Linux, they will be interested in doing that.

This is not about you and me who install are sorts of add blockers and on our Windows machines, run our free Anti virus programs.
This is about your parents PCs who will run things as they come.

Extra income will make the Linux Desktop possible. Pity that it is Ubuntu. Well, it IS the Windows distribution from Linux.

Two points here

[rumith]

1) Remember, while most geeks will either be annoyed or even outright disgusted of this move, this is exactly the kind of thing that gets an operating system rolling for the wider audiences (IMO) and adds economical grounds for further expansion. Could this also be Amazon testing the potential of making Ubuntu a partner OS, since they currently lack a desktop operating system integrated with their online shopping "experience"? Maybe.
2) However what I know for sure is that this feature is likely to be US-only (unfortunately for those international Ubuntu users who prefer buying their music instead of pirating them), as is much of Amazon's stock. I mean, come on. I know that overseas shipping of physical items is hard, but working out the paperwork with the studios for selling a damn file? How hard can that be?

Re:Two points here

[rubycodez]

no, Ubuntu's only viable option for cash flow is larger acceptance into corporate workplace. The huge user base is what got them to the top & to be noticed. if they cut that off (continue the mass exodus that Unity started), then there will be no one pushing it in the corproate environment and Canonical will die. good riddance.

Re:Two points here

[Bieeanda]

What? Amazon's entire sales regime revolves around making shopping as thoughtless as possible, hence that infamous one-click buying patent. Shilling for a branded browser is one thing, but a whole operating system? Come on. There's fantasy, there's conspiracy, and then there's utter delusion.

Re:Two points here

[rumith]

Perhaps. Still, it hasn't stopped them from forking a whole operating system (Android) and selling devices that enable that thoughtless shopping experience. And who's to say that they won't attempt to enter the desktop/htpc/whatever game as well, forking Ubuntu or using it outright for better penetration of an existing market, however small? I definitely wouldn't rule out such an option, although I agree that integrating Amazon services into a media consumption device makes much more sense than integrating them into a full-fledged computer used for work as well as entertainment.

Re:Two points here

[gl4ss]

it doesn't really have to involve amazon any more than amazon having a referral bonus system.

Re:Two points here

[ceoyoyo]

Interesting. Can you name one operating system that has become successful via it's use of ads for a third party?

Re:Two points here

[Trifthen]

I think that's the key, really. Quite a few companies I know are switching from RHEL or CentOS to Ubuntu LTS releases purely because of familiarity. If that changes, Ubuntu will lose the corporate customers that actually matter.

Redhat got it right. I'm not sure why Ubuntu is having such a hard time figuring this out.

He who pays, owns.

[goodmanj]

This is not just annoying, it's the beginning of the end of Ubuntu as free software. No matter how unobtrusive the ads are, if Amazon is paying Ubuntu, Ubuntu is bound to become dependent on that cash stream, which means Amazon controls what happens to Ubuntu. And Amazon has shown little interest in the future of free software.

Now, this isn't entirely a new thing: companies like IBM and Google have been paying for Linux development (in the form of hiring Linux developers) for years. But when an entire distro is financially captured by the biggest online retailer on the planet... that's something new.

Re:He who pays, owns.

[Kjella]

This is not just annoying, it's the beginning of the end of Ubuntu as free software. No matter how unobtrusive the ads are, if Amazon is paying Ubuntu, Ubuntu is bound to become dependent on that cash stream, which means Amazon controls what happens to Ubuntu. And Amazon has shown little interest in the future of free software.

So who cares if it's just incidental? Amazon pays to develop Ubuntu => Ubuntu has polish => users choose Ubuntu => ad revenue from some of the users => more money to develop Ubuntu. As long as that circle is turning a profit and code gets written, who cares? The only thing they could possibly close source on are the things Ubuntu owns 100% copyright on, which is very little. And how exactly would that improve their cash flow since they'd lose an enormous amount of community goodwill and charging a subscription fee would kill 99.9% of their ad revenue potential? Amazon will have an interest in making more people use Ubuntu, thus writing code that makes it more usable. I'd say their interests seem pretty well aligned with the community.

Re:Linux land of the ads

[betterunixthanunix]

Neither does Red Hat. In fact, Ubuntu is a rare case of someone trying to monetize a GNU/Linux distro with advertising; most distros are either community projects or they are monetized with subscriptions.

Re:ubuntu is awful

[jedidiah]

Unless you have thousands of dollars to buy such apps, it doesn't matter that much really.

In the meantime, I can have a much faster machine that's also more maintainable. I can upgrade my storage and video card with ease rather than contributing to the local land fill.

Apple brand doorstops are like bitch slapping your mother.

About those forks

[quixote9]

There's LinuxMint. Not precisely a fork because it's based on Debian itself, but there's the fairly recent SolusOS which is a real beauty. It actually has up-to-date versions of the kernel and major software. (I know. Whoever heard of such a thing, right?)

So the countdown went through 0 and has been in positive numbers for years already.

ubuntu forgets the one thing

[rubycodez]

all the people who run it, but never paid, are not "freeloaders", they are the massive user base that gave the Ubuntu distro momentum and pushed it to the top of linux distros. they got it into the corporate workplace (my employer uses Ubuntu), they make the helpful forum posts, etc.

your monetizing needs to be done outside of those people, it's done with services, support, add-ons for the corporate environment, etc.

Re:ubuntu forgets the one thing

[TheGratefulNet]

more attacks on the forty seven percent!

(notsureifserious)

Re:ubuntu forgets the one thing

[jbicha]

So you're saying that not only should Canonical give you Ubuntu for free, but that they owe you not to make any money off you to pay their bills, even indirectly via extra search results that don't cost you a dime and can easily be disabled by anyone who cares?

Re:ubuntu forgets the one thing

[rubycodez]

yes. because I've helped them be in the corporate environment with paying corporate customers.

also, to have userable UI as standard

damn straight

Re:ubuntu forgets the one thing

[udachny]

Canonical doesn't owe you anything, it owes itself to run a profitable operation, otherwise the subsidy will end and the business will shut down, full stop.

If they can't be profitable with the service model based on corporate clients, it means they can't be profitable and they will shut down the doors.

Re:ubuntu forgets the one thing

[gl4ss]

he's saying that they should do like redhat.
I had redhat 3.something once(13 years ago or something..), never paid a dime for it, but being an user contributed to their relevance.

of course they can be disabled by anyone who cares, that's not the point. nickel and diming with search results royalties is what shitty windows shareware does, no need to get into that game when they could sell some proper support that was worth something - you know, something that would get you access to the devs who could fix bugs standing in the way of your rollout to corporate laptops - not really wanting yet another online storage service.

Re:ubuntu forgets the one thing

[jbicha]

They sell exactly that. http://www.ubuntu.com/business/advantage

Re:ubuntu forgets the one thing

[shutdown -p now]

your monetizing needs to be done outside of those people, it's done with services, support, add-ons for the corporate environment, etc.

Well, why don't you write a business plan for them, if it's that easy?

Have you considered that perhaps they've looked into it (they already have paid service contracts and such, don't they?), and it simply doesn't make their ends meet?

Re:ubuntu forgets the one thing

[rubycodez]

I'm saying they won't be profitable this way, and shouldn't try. they will only annoy.

Ubuntu will lose in the market if they lose mindshare of the non-paying users.

you seem to be forgetting that Debian does 95% of the work that is in the Ubuntu distribution. Is Ubuntu massively supporting Debian? no they aren't, your viewpoint is silly

Huh... I guess the appeal of Unity is irresistible

[blind biker]

Now that Unity has gained Ubuntu such a great usage/market share and cemented user loyalty, Canonical can bring home the moolah by integrating Amazon ads with Unity.

(This pas was written in an alternative universe where the above makes sense)

Run until my legs pump batter acid

[halfkoreanamerican]

Can I not go anywhere without being harassed? Now my own desktop is unsafe. If it is easy to disable or uninstall them then I will not scream about it, but if they are obnoxious then I'll just pick a different flavor linux for use. It's not like there are not other options.

Re:Which distro will you move on to?

[gshegosh]

NetRunner. Best KDE distro I've tried, now on my "production" machines.
Also, comes from a company that now sponsors Kubuntu. Hopefully they don't start spoiling it with ads because of that...

So you donated? Or just pretend?

[raymorris]

So the while time you've been using Linux you've been paying, donating to your favorite projects, right? You've always had the opportunity to pay. If someone hasn't donated even $10 ever, I'd say that means they'd rather let it come to this. Users have always had the choice. If you'd rather pay, apt-remove and donate to an ad-free project. I'm about to eat breakfast. I'm a Linux developer. Breakfast costs money. If you'd rather pay, then do so. Lunch is coming up in a few hours and it has to be paid for somehow.

Kubuntu's big break?

[Rambo Tribble]

Since Kubuntu is now a "community project", it shouldn't be beholden to the mercenary caprice of Canonical. One real draw to Ubuntu is the repositories and PPAs. Hopefully, Kubuntu can provide that without the marketing troll.

nitpick: grammar check

[jabberw0k]

That would be, "firmware sets" or "firmware packages." Like "software" or "clothing," "firmware" is already a collective plural -- you do not have "two softwares" or "two clothings" but rather "two pieces of software, two pieces of clothing, and two pieces of firmware."

Re:Huh... I guess the appeal of Unity is irresisti

[couchslug]

The "above" makes PERFECT sense, since it's easy to defeat!

I'm all for online ads. I block them so I don't give a fuck about what I do not see.

Re:Free with every Amazon order

[betterunixthanunix]

while posting on ad-supported Slashdot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adblockplus

Do They Really Think...?

[Zamphatta]

That trick might work on Windows users, who don't know much about their computers.... but I think 99% of Ubuntu users will just right click "unlock from launcher" as one of the first things they do. Most of those who'll do that, will probably also purge the system of these Amazon invaders. I know I will. Linux Mint doesn't sound so bad now. In fact, this might be a good time for me to try FreeBSD 9....

Re:Adbuntu

[interval1066]

Its not a big deal, but it makes my 12 month long oddessy with Mint a much more comfortable descision. After 5 good years with Ubuntu I ran for the hills after the gnome 3/unity fiasco, I think this will be the straw that breaks the camel's back for others.

This means Canonical can no longer be trusted

[Anonymous Coward]

One important reason for using FOSS is trust. When a project is noncommercial, copylefted, and freely available to the community, you can be reasonably confident that the developers do not serve any other masters. With community FOSS, I don't find myself spending hours firewalling apps off or scrutinizing them for data leaks. I don't worry that my machine might be serving someone other than myself.

This move makes them guilty of dual agency. They no longer have the user's best interests in mind 100% of the time. Now, our interests are subject to a "balancing act."

Anybody who promotes advertising on any model other than opt-in with true informed consent cannot be trusted. This goes double for those who install adware on the client side.

I will not be upgrading and will begin discontinuing my use of Ubuntu on desktops and servers. The project has now become commercialized, just like those "free" adware apps which infest app stores.

Adbuntu

[flyingfsck]

Adbuntu, the consumer friendly distribution.

Hmm

[mattr]

I wonder does Ubuntu get a cut on all purchases ever made by user through the Amazon thingy?

Oh good

[Arancaytar]

And here I thought my switch to Debian might have been premature.

Left Ubuntu

[systemidx]

And moved to Linux Mint a long time ago. I really do see it as the better debian-based distro.

Re:Free with every Amazon order

[Anonymous Coward]

I was a bit dismayed when I first read about this Amazon bundling. I have been considering switching to some flavor of Linux for awhile so I could have an OS that is mine...and not someone elses profit center.

The biggest issue I see with my switching (and many others) is I grew up in the DOS/Win pipeline. Love it or hate it...I understand it and can use it effectively. The couple distros I tried were not a pleasant experience.

The first headache was just figuring out which distro to try. To many and many are just minor variations of the same thing. for someone who doesn't understand Linux it's confusing and all the reviews speak in that quirky language of 'nix experts which doesn't help the non-geek at all.

Second headache was installing a distro and finding out it didn't work as expected (My case, dual monitor setup didn't work). Ultimately I had to use a Win box to surf the net to see if I could find a fix for the issue. Not knowing the commands (this is learning a new language) and reading hundreds of conflicting ways of how the problems was being solved I ended up going back to XP.

The last hurdle is the divide between user friendly and a geek tool. It reminds me of a guy I knew a looooong time ago (MS-DOS days) that formatted his floppies by typing in all the parameter switches (/sectors /tracks /system /size /sides etc) and refused to acknowledge that it could be done with a single parameter.

I know I can figure how to remove the offending ad serving, but the idea of having to 'modify' the OS kinda pisses me off. The average user wanting to get away from the corporate heel on their software may just pass this distro by.

As a side note...If I ask in here what flavor of Linux I should try I bet I would get 12 different (but good) answers on why I should use ___________.

Re:Adbuntu

[Knuckles]

Possibly. Though I recently installed Mint 13 w/ Mate for a friend who hated Unity and wanted Gnome 2 back, and personally I missed Ubuntu's polish when playing with that install. YMMV

Re:ubuntu is awful

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed. I generally find that my 2.7Ghz quad core i7 Macbook Pro with 16Gb of RAM and a 768Gb SSD and Retina display isn't used for much other than to hold doors open.

And it's so skinny that it really does a pretty poor job of even that.

Did you try GNOME Classic?

[jbicha]

Or you could just install gnome-panel and choose GNOME Classic from the login screen. It's more similar to GNOME 2 since it's pretty much the same thing just with more bugfixes and a slightly tweaked UI to resemble GNOME Shell a little more. Oh, and you'll need to hold down the Alt key to modify the panels.

Re:Did you try GNOME Classic?

[SteveFoerster]

One family member likes Unity, I and the others do not and use gnome-panel. It just wasn't that big a deal.

Re:Did you try GNOME Classic?

[HJED]

Does it work with multiple montiors, because Gnome shell does not. Personally I use kubuntu, hopefully they won't be including adds in that as well.

Left a long time ago

[amiller2571]

I switch to Arch Linux a long time ago. I don't like Ads in my browser why would I ever want them in my OS!

So which distro?

[DougInNavarre]

For someone who grew up in the Windows environment and considers himself a wannabe geek I'm totally lost on which distro to use. From a "User" point of view all reviews of which flavor is best is just geek speak. Two distros I tried in the past didn't work "out of the box" and reading forums on how to fix the issue just leaves you confused. Remember that 'nix is a foreign language to many of us and just saying type sudo somethingorother will fix it means absolutely nothing to us. I don't want to be a geek...I don't have time to learn. My day is busy enough and I'm an old dawg.

Re:So which distro?

[serviscope_minor]

and considers himself a wannabe geek

I don't want to be a geek...

Perhaps you should try making up your mind.

I don't have time to learn.

Then stick with what you know.

Show me

[djfake]

Where to pay to make it all go away. Maybe donations are the way to go? Or just sudo apt-get uninstall amazon?

The other part is the bad idea

[betterunixthanunix]

When I want something, yes, i go to Amazon to and search for things -- and in that case, their advertising actually benefits me, and there is no issue with it. The problem is that Ubuntu will also include unsolicited advertising e.g. when you try to run Empathy you'll see advertisements that Amazon thinks are related to empathy. That is an annoyance, a waste of bandwidth, a waste of screenspace, and a waste of CPU cycles, and I would remove it right away.

The difference is between advertisements you ask for, and advertisements you do not ask for.

PC a glorifying shopping mall?

[devent]

So Ubuntu/Canonical is now moving to make the PC a glorifying shopping mall? They are in good company, Google (Chrome OS), Mozilla (Firefox OS), Microsoft (Windows 8) and Apple are all moving in the same direction.

Now this Unity and Gnome 3 makes for me sense, because to present stuff like a products shelf in a super market the Unity and Gnome 3 desktops are very good, but not so good for getting stuff done (you know, like open multiple windows, and get out of my way while I work).

So I guess Linux with KDE4, Xfce or the other light weight desktops are the last bastion of General Purpose Personal Computers (aka PCs and Laptops). Who knows, in 10 years I have to install a server oriented Linux distribution like Redhat or CentOS to have my work done without the commercialization and the social stuff.

Re:Adbuntu

[History's Coming To]

Assuming that the ads are as open source as the rest of the installation then there's a better idea - I suspect Amazon are suddenly going to find a lot of two-year-old Hungarian speaking Inuit who are interested in crochet masters from C17th Solomon Islands in their user base.

They could get nasty about it if they want.

[big_e_1977]

If Canonical really wanted to press the issue, they could easily make unity-lens-shopping a dependency of unity. sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping package would create a dependency problem that the package manager would resolve by either keeping it installed or removing all of unity. Many non technical users wouldn't even know how to get rid of the ads, thus they will stick around by default. An ethical approach to this would have been prompting during the upgrade or the install whether or not to enable them. Even some windows programs bundled with crapware at least give you the clear option to opt out before the installation. If I didn't read this thread on slashdot, I would have no idea what the offending package name would have been. I would search first for the terms "amazon", "ads", "banner", "adware", "sponsor", the word "shopping" would have been quite a bit farther down on my list. If this is the future of the linux desktop, I don't want it.

Re:They could get nasty about it if they want.

[Knuckles]

That's fine if you don't want it, other people might. I can see your complaint about notification and easy removal, but of course searching Google for ubuntu and ads of course already finds you the info. Anyway, there was no final release yet, who's to say whether they planned an option anyway.

Re:They could get nasty about it if they want.

[Knuckles]

Sorry. "search for Ubuntu and Amazon and ads" I meant.

Re:Oh look!

[jbicha]

You do know that Mint makes a decent amount of money via search referrals which is basically the same thing as this new Unity feature. And that's not enough income so they also persistently ask for donations. Would you rather have Amazon search results in your Dash (which can be useful and can easily be removed) or would you rather have Clem asking you for money when ever you visit the official distro website?

Linux Mint isn't any more of a non-profit than Canonical is. Both are companies that are trying to bring in enough income to pay a decent living wage to their employees, while still providing a bunch of free stuff to their users.

Re:Free with every Amazon order

[Bieeanda]

You remember what people did with all of those AOL CDs, right? There's a world of difference between a borderline scammy service that hooked countless computer-illiterate people and an installer for a whole new operating system. Jesus Christ.

"Is you old Windows PC running slow? Replace Windows with this FREE disk and get speed and security without buying a new PC."

Imagine the backlash when Moms and Dads everywhere 'lose' all of their documents and data that's stashed in traditional silly places that Ubuntu won't look by default, like the Windows install's desktop and (god help us all) the recycling bin.

Be interesting to see how it goes

[slazzy]

Personally, I haven't upgraded yet so I haven't seen this. I wouldn't mind myself as long as:

A) doesn't do any "pre-caching" or use any bandwidth unless feature is opened.
B) easy to uninstall
C) doesn't come with the server version when you do have a GUI.
If Ubuntu violates any of the above I'll be using other distros from now on.

Re:Be interesting to see how it goes

[tftp]

By continuing to use a product you will validate Ubuntu's belief that ads are OK and the users want them. This will give them incentive to insert more unwanted stuff into the next release.

I'm running 10.04.4 on the server currently. If Canonical does not mend its ways that would be the last install of Ubuntu that I made, no question about that. Since geeks comprise at least 100% of Ubuntu users, and since most geeks are militant about ads and spyware, I suspect that Canonical will soon find their product unclaimed by users.

R.I.P. Ubuntu

[srobert]

2 self-inflicted wounds for Ubuntu; Unity and now a fatal crass commercial affiliation that just won't appeal to Linux desktop users who have other choices. Ubuntu's suicide leaves room for a new top dog among easy to use Linux distributions. Linux Mint, perhaps? Xubuntu?

What...the...hell?

[xQuarkDS9x]

Seriousely what the hell? Is Canonical that desperate for money they have to force ads on us in the operating system itself? I've been using Ubuntu (and windows only to play World of Warcraft) pretty much since it first came out both on my desktop and Kubuntu on my girlfriends laptop. If both of us had to put up with ads you can guarantee i'd be finding out pretty damn quick how to either block the ads via opendns and or a hack of some sort to disable this garbage or stop using it altogether.

I've been blocking all ads and popups while browsing as well over the years (Proxomitron and later Adblock plus with various filter lists in firefox) and i'll be damned to see annoying, obnoxious, and data mined ads forced down my throat on the desktop.

We are the product!

[Teckla]

OMG, Ubuntu is going ad supported???

WE ARE THE PRODUCT!!!

Sorry, I couldn't resist.

Re:Adbuntu

[Knuckles]

Big deal? You'd be shitting up a hate storm if this were a discussion about ads on Kindles. Fucking fanbois. Amazing.

I can assure you that ads on Kindle leave me entirely cold. As for the size of the deal, what I said what that the OP (you?) wrote as if Canonical had gone to any lengths to prevent removal, when OP wrote that someone would have to develop a tool for that. Which is plainly wrong and possibly flamebait.

Re:ubuntu is awful

[lightknight]

No secondary storage HD for your torrents / games? Not a real geek!

Huh, green monster coming alive

[Vince6791]

If ads start popping all over the desktop including inside the unity dash, than it's over. Mark shuttleworth is worth more than $500million, canonical has a large multiple cash streams coming in already which pays the employees and still money left over. I wouldn't be surprised if canonical went public. The sad thing is canonical is making money off of programmers who contribute freely, and these developers won't see shit. It's a fucking insult of canonical doing something stupid as this ad shit especially when they are making tons of money already. Look it up.
Going to switch to Linux Mint 13 Kde. I installed linux mint 13 xfce on a netbook and it runs fine. If all linux distros take this direction than it's hello bsd or the old windows 7.

Unity's pretty good

[Compaqt]

I thought that all features (which use compositing) weren't enabled when you used a VM. Maybe it would have been different if you tried it on a separate partition on the bare metal.

Anyway, as a non-noob user (developer) I'm here to say that Unity as of 12.04 is pretty good for power users and developers.

From my perspective, Unity is pretty good for multitasking workflows. In the earlier versions, Unity was useless for multiple workspaces because you could basically only have one copy of a program usefully running.

In the current version, there are indicators that tell you if one copy of a program is running, or two, or more. And if it's on the current workspace or not.

Although I had thought that I would hate it, it's actually pretty good, because 95% of the time you want to work with the apps, files, and programs you were most recently working with. Also, the Alt+Tab and Alt+` works well. They're basically integrated together so you can move out of one mode to the other (once you're in Alt+Tab or Alt+` mode, try using the arrow keys).

Also, one misapprehension I had about Unity was that youd have a huge number of icons down the left side. But since you only have one icon per program (instead of per window), it's not bad.

Finally, you should install Cardapio. It gives you a hierarchical (organized by category) menu of applications so you don't have to know the name of app before you search for it (a major complaint about Unity).

Re:Unity's pretty good

[TheSeatOfMyPants]

Finally, you should install Cardapio. It gives you a hierarchical (organized by category) menu of applications so you don't have to know the name of app before you search for it (a major complaint about Unity).

So basically, people should download Unity and spend time customizing it to include missing parts of the classic/standard desktop that Unity's paradigm is supposedly superior to?

Re:Unity's pretty good

[lister king of smeg]

i believe that most pc vertualization systems now at least have hardware accelerated graphics for OpenGL when running on top of the same host OS and I have seen direct X hardware acceleration on windows host with windows guests and VMWare promises it on VMWare fusion for mac but I haven't tried it out because i dont want to pay for a mac, a virtualization solution and a windows licenses just to try out one feature, if only they would port fusion to Linux. Also virtualbox has an unstable wine based direct 3d patch. but back to the point it is not impossible to get all of the unity crap on a vm you just have to futz with it for longer then it worth to simply play with a kludgey interface.

Re:Unity's pretty good

[Compaqt]

OK, that's possible. I had heard that you might only be able to run Unity2D depending on your setup, which means that some of the nice Alt+Tab functionality is missing.

Re:Unity's pretty good

[Compaqt]

Yeah, I hear you.

But, in the time that I installed Cardapio after 12.04 came out, I used it a couple of times, and not once in the past few months.

That's because the apps I use are already pinned (Chromium, Firefox, file manager, LibreOffice, terminal, gedit, screenshot, and CherryTree note-taking app). I sometimes use Netbeans, but that installs its own icon to the desktop. The handful of other apps are in the MRU list in the Ubuntu menu.

Re:Unity's pretty good

[atomicxblue]

I am afraid that we are at a disagreement about the "pretty good for power users and developers" bit. In one of my tests with Ubuntu 12.04, I opened Firefox, minimized it and clicked the pinned icon, assuming it would bring the window back into focus. Instead of maximizing it, Unity opened a new instance and tried to reload the tabs I had opened. The expected operation would be for Firefox to have the ability to remember the text on the web page and not reload it every time it is brought back into focus. This basically restricts you to using one application at a time.

Now, please try to connected to a bookmarked SSH connection to another computer on your network in 2 clicks, without touching the keyboard, other than typing in the password. Yes I know that you can use terminal, but I am talking from the aspect of a newish user without all the command fu. Try to get to terminal in less than 2 clicks on Unity. It's impossible. The major flaw with the interface is that users must know the name of the software they wish to run before they run it. For example, how is a new user / recent Windows convert supposed to know that Totem is used to play media files and Nautilus is "Windows Explorer"?

It doesn't help matters either that the developers refuse to take any patches or suggestions from their "Lusers"... It also doesn't help that Shuttworth has publicly said about the Unity detractors, "There is going to be a crowd that is just too cool to use something that looks really slick and there is nothing we can do for them". I'll be the first to admit, I love epeen bling on my computer, but it still must serve the basic purpose -- allow me to do what I want and stay out of my way. (I'm looking at you, peek-a-boo Unity bar...)

Re:Unity's pretty good

[Compaqt]

Regarding your point about FF reloading tabs every time you minimize it and then click the icon: I will simply accept that that's how it works on your system, and no wonder you hate Unity because that's simply nutty and unacceptable.

On the other hand, that's not how it has worked on any system I have installed it on, nor on other people's (including on this thread). Clicking the icon brings the program back up. If you have multiple windows of a program running, you get the most recently used instance, which is what you want 90% of the time. Click again to get a selector for the other 10%.

Regarding the second point: how about we say it's not a noob searching for SSH (which is doubtful), but rather a movie player or something. Your point still stands: How are you supposed to know the name of the app before you search for it? On the other hand, if I search for "movie" I get the Totem Movie Player.

Still, hierarchical menus aid discoverability. It would be nice if Ubuntu could integrate Cardapio for noobs.

Third point: Yeah, that attitude really turned me off, too. Luckily for Ubuntu, they managed to get their act together with some sorely needed improvements to Unity in the 12.04 release.

Re:Unity's pretty good

[garaged]

I am the sysadmin kind of power user, my desktop icons are useless since anything I would want is available much faster from CLI or with shortcuts and autocompletion (with tab), so, for non power users I can understand relying on dektop icons to overcome memory limitations, but that's about it, as soon as yor desktop env. keeps you off from getting more efficient it is time to search for a new one.

Re:Unity's pretty good

[jwhitener]

I'd try Cardapio out if I could install it. https://bugs.launchpad.net/cardapio/+bug/833382

Re:Unity's pretty good

[atomicxblue]

They may have changed the functionality by now, but I was just going by what I experienced with the Unity bar the first day it was released. I gave it a good hour to put it through its paces and that was enough for me.

They could take a page from Linux Mint's book and pop up a welcome menu with an option "Take a tour of your Ubuntu system", or something along those lines. That would go a long way towards what we all want -- getting more users to try Linux and decide to keep it on their computer.

Welcome to Fedora

[lowlands]

As a Fedorian I welcome everybody from Ubuntu who seek an alternative. Fedora is a free cutting edge distro. The good side: no ads and other commercial ties making *you* the product or that unity abomination. The downside: Fedora is void of any (potentially) patent encumbered or non-free software so you will need to make a bit of an effort to get all those codecs, flash and non-free apps etc installed on your shiny new Fedora powered box. It's worth it though. Even GNOME3 grows on you once you have slapped some sanity into it by installing a bunch of extensions. If you are not interested in Fedora, there are a ton of different distributions to choose from. Head over to distrowatch.com to get an idea how many there are.

ads encroaching everywhere

[CoderFool]

next stop, location sensing popup ads in your googles glasses. Imagine driving past a store and then in your augmented reality glasses an ad pops up dead center while your trying to make a turn or change lanes...

Re:I think it's quite a good idea

[csumpi]

You already have a browser open.

Freetards think that software development is free

[aristotle-dude]

Developing software costs time and money. I work for a living as a software development. Writing good software that does not crash all the time and takes into account multiple possibilities and user actions is hard.

Perhaps they should offer an ad free version or an unlock code to remove the ads for a flat fee. The GPL, much like Communism does not on a large scale. Once a project becomes large enough, it can no longer survive as a volunteer only endeavour.

The reality is that if you find something valuable then you should be willing to pay for it either through ads or a flat fee otherwise you are a freeloader/leach/lamer.

Well... Ubuntu is pretty much on the downswing...

[nighthawk243]

I tried installing Ubuntu on my Sister's netbook yesterday. Ubuntu actually ran slower than Windows 7 did on it. Crunchbang was much snappier.

What about privacy?

[mystikkman]

From the actual link:
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/09/online-shopping-features-...

>For example, when you want to search for “dishwashers” on Amazon you can just enter “Dishwashers” in the Dash and a small line of “suggested items” from Amazon will appear.

>The same happens when you search for a local file or app from the Home Lens.

>So yes, you can expect to see self-help guides on compassion when trying to launch Empathy.

>‘More Suggestions’ is a strange turn of phrase; most people don’t tend to expect product suggestions when looking for their e-mail app. But I can cede that it’s a far better name than that used in development: ‘treat yourself’

Showing ads when you search locally seems a tad much and a waste of system resources. Isn't this equivalent to showing shopping ads based on keyword searches in Spotlight and the Windows Start menu?

Just realized that I sometimes type keywords to find local files matching filenames and content that's personal in nature. Does this mean all those keywords are sent to Amazon and perhaps data mined to show personalized results?

Re:Free with every Amazon order

[Anonymous Coward]

posting on ad-supported Slashdot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adblockplus

sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping
Wahhh! (That was onomatopoeia for baby's cry for the uninformed)

What is your point?

[Anonymous Coward]

You have an interesting, but completely pointless rant. Linux (desktop, server, phone, or otherwise) does not guarantee profits. The GPL does not prevent you from charging, but it also does not guarantee profits. It is widely known that the best way to become a millionaire selling Linux is to start out as a billionaire. Keeping a Linux community together is like herding cats, so buyer beware.

The problem with your rant is a paradigm issue. You don't really understand why we use Linux in the first place. The small community that exists around Linux chooses not to have companies and governments dictate terms and usage to us. In that light:

When Ubuntu moved the close button, I moved it back.
When Ubuntu installed Mono, I uninstalled it and blocked it from being reinstalled.
When Ubuntu switched to Unity, I switched to Gnome Classic.
When Ubuntu installed Zeitgeist, I uninstalled it too.
When Ubuntu removed Gnome Classic, I switched to LXDE.

Now I use Mint because it satisfies my need for stability, security, privacy, and performance. That is the point of Linux. You can make it anything that you want. It survives the whims of any company and it really does not matter if Canonical survives. Can you say the same for Solaris, C64, OS2, Cobalt, SCO, Next, System 7, Windows CE, or the hardware that they run on?

Thank you, Cannonical, for your contributions to the desktop. Before you tweaked the desktop it was a pain to use USB flash drives and I had to write a script. Before you set up PPAs, I had to hunt around repos for drivers, (livna, PLF, easyurpmi, etc) codecs, and proprietary blurbs to make my system work. Before you worked on wireless, I had to set up a script in /etc/init.d to activate my wireless card at bootup. My desktop experience has become significantly better on all distributions because of your work. Sorry about your bottom line, but it was never about money in the first place.

Re:What is your point?

[unixisc]

His point was that Canonical wouldn't remain in business precisely b'cos there aren't too many ways to make money on Linux, particularly Linux on the desktop. Canonical is only the latest in a litany of companies that have come & gone, which he listed. I get your point about Linux users, but you miss the point about Linux producers. At the end of the day, all the people who do this for a living need to see a steady stream of cash flowing in - and no, tin cups don't cover the rent & college. So as the sponges continue to just consume what they can get for 'free' w/o contributing to the livelihood of those who produced it, don't be surprised as fewer & fewer want to do it.

Now, you may argue that Linux has grown to an optimum size in terms of API, ABI, feature sets, DEs and so on, and at this point, just leave well enough alone. That's not a bad strategy, as some, like gNewSense have adapted. In which case, the best they can do is have teams to do bug fixes, add device drivers for new things that their users want the OS to support, work on applets and sell them similar to iOS applets, and so on. At least that is something that might ensure the sustainability of the OS long term. But note that w/ the larger OS, compatibility can be a big issue, when one considers all the variables in question, and having to test different combinations of them.

Re:What is your point?

[hairyfeet]

Thanks for seeing what I was getting at but I think the bigger point is the "year of the linux desktop" myth will stay just that, simply because there is NO way to make money on a Linux desktop and the costs of bringing Linux up to the levels of OSX and Win 7 are simply too high.

Now the GPL/Linux way of doing things works in server because corporations not only pay admins to deal with problems but spend millions of dollars on support to get the things that are giving them trouble fixed., the same is true of embedded work. But on the desktop i could literally wallpaper this page with show stopping bugs, things neither Windows nor OSX users have had to deal with in YEARS, but they don't get fixed simply because there is no money there.

To have a Linux that could stand toe to toe with the others you'd need a good 100 million dollars worth of work, because the distro would HAVE to work from RTM to EOL in say 7 years with NO breakage. Sure you once in a blue moon you hear of some update breaking some obscure Windows driver, but its rare.How many times have you heard of an update wasting pulse or breaking WiFi? Far too often. So Sound,WiFi, and probably X would have to go, and they'd have to fork most of the internals because Torvalds and company are notorious for treating the internals like their own pet projects and not caring about breakage, so 100 million minimum.

The mistake Shuttleworth made was using linux in the first place as there is simply no way to make money other than 1.-Support contracts like enterprise, or 2.-The tin cup which simply won't pay for the amount of work required. So he should have went BSD, where you would be welcome to the original files but the stuff Canonical built on top would be theirs to sell, just as Apple did. As you noted you try charging for Linux, hell even just having ads, and the users just go to one of the 50 "based on" versions of Ubuntu, where they get the advantages of all the work Shuttleworth paid for but without having to give anything for it.

The simple fact is that while RMS may think coders are worthless (notice how the FSF has NO problem taking money from big corps like Intel, and you never EVER hear RMS railing on how CEOs or doctors or plumbers should work for free, ONLY coders) but IRL they have to pay for their education, healthcare, a home, food, to get the quality of coders and the amount you'd need to make linux world class in the desktop arena simply can't happen because with the GPL you have to give away all the work you do, meaning I can just set up a website, copy you down to the last file, and offer it for free. Now what desktop user is gonna pay YOU when I can do that?

Re:What is your point?

[unixisc]

Forgetting about FSF/GPL/RMS for the moment, one thing does have to change about Open-Source - OSI's standard. They need to stop defining that the software must not have any restrictions on re-distribution - something one doesn't get from the name itself. I've read Cathedral & the Bazaar, and ESR is absolutely right that the source code should accompany the binaries whenever software is sold or changes hands. This part I'm all for. What I'm not for is the requirement that a vendor cannot restrict a customer from redistributing it. In other businesses, it doesn't apply, since it's a zero-sum-game, but in s/w, it does. So that freedom to redistribute needs to go, and the only thing that should be there is that the source code should accompany the binaries. The vendor can put whatever other restrictions might be appropriate

Yeah, for the sake of preserving one's business, I'm all for a vendor requiring that a customer can't compete w/ it, or put other restrictions, such as no re-distribution of either an original nor a modified work, and so on. The idea behind supporting the source code following the binaries like a shadow would be to ensure that in the event that a vendor went tits up, the customer could hire programmers to maintain or fix the code they have, so that they don't have to buy new software (and in some cases, even hardware) if a vendor goes under. This is a win-win situation that reduces a customer's cost of ownership, while preserving the interests of the vendor as well - that others don't get to sponge off their original work. That way, software doesn't have to be closed source just to protect the interests of its creators.

Re:What is your point?

[hairyfeet]

Congrats sir, you nailed it in one. if you think about it your solution would even solve RMS' classic "printer story" which started the GPL since he'd HAVE the source he needed to fix the problem, he just wouldn't have been able to put out his own version of the software.

The problem is, and after speaking with other who pointed out I was wrong when I called him a communist, is that I truly believe that RMS HATES programmers. I mean when they took him up on his own words when he said that they should give away all their work and make money on documentation? he started complaining and demanding that "documentation should be free!". yet he and the FSF seem to have NO problem taking money from those that gain from that labor such as Intel, nor do you ever see RMS railing on how CEOs or doctors or plumbers should work for nothing ONLY programmers.

In the end I think you'll agree that with unlimited redistribution and no clauses to stop anyone from just offering all your work for nothing there is only 3 ways to make money with Linux, 1.-The support model, which if you think about gives you an incentive to make things a little more PITA than they ought to be because if its truly great why would I need you to support it?, 2.-By selling hardware, such as routers and tablets and what have you, because the software in that case really isn't the product, and 3.-The tin cup model.

But to take a shot at the desktop none of these strategies work, nobody will buy support, you're not gonna be able to compete with the OEMs on hardware when they sell Win 7 Basic netbooks at $199 thanks to insane economies of scale, and the tin cup model won't bring in enough money nor give you any way to plan for a future, as what coder is gonna want to take a job where he knows they might be laid off next quarter because not enough change was thrown in the hat?

To me the really fricking sad part is an OSS desktop was a GREAT idea, a desktop where the OEMs and ODMs couldn't abandon your hardware by refusing to give you drivers for the later versions, but as you said when anybody can redistribute and compete against you without having to give you a cent of the R&D costs how can you possibly stay afloat? Its like a USA manufacturer trying to compete with Chinese slave labor while their factory just dumps toxins out the back door into the ditch. You just can't do it, GPL as is just doesn't work.

Its also a damned shame we won't see Shuttleworth take your advice and make an Ubuntu based on PC-BSD with Debian, then they could actually sell some copies and I'd be right there ready to buy mine, as we little guys have NO love for the way MSFT gouges system builders. Sadly without the money to fork my own distro the constant driver breakage and problems like Pulse screwage makes my after support costs shoot through the roof.

Funny that so many here call me a "dirty evil M$ shill ZOMFG!" when I was one of the first ones on Ubuntu, and had tried every flavor under the sun just trying to find a way NOT to give a quarter of my build price to MSFT. But instead we just get excuses, "works for me!" and name calling. Damned shame because the idea was great, the execution just sucked.

Re:I'd prefer to pay ... not

[Anonymous Coward]

I've enjoyed using Ubuntu. It was the first Linux distro that "just worked" for me (by which I mean, wifi/video/audio worked out of the box). And it's free!

I don't know what kind of ARPU they expect from this, but as an Ubuntu user I'd prefer to just pay. A freemium model would do, maybe something like "get the previous LTS version for free, get the current one for $X". Or "donate to enable advanced features" or something. But peppering my work/leisure environment with third-party advertisements (i.e. spyware and probably malware at some point)? No thanks.

That was the reason why people liked ubuntu to begin with, myself included: linux was a PITA to install for desktop use. Ubuntu solved most of the problems with installation (video drivers, etc); however, today regular Debian has caught up to the same ease of Ubuntu. Hell, Fedora is just as easy as are most distros now. Why continue using derivatives that are only concerned with form (Unity, ads, etc) when you can use the base that cares only about function?

Is Ubuntu broke?

[kungfuj35u5]

Why do they need more revenue, isn't Mark Shuttleworth a multimillionaire still? I thought he was about philanthropy not profits. Why couldn't they just generate ad revenue from their web page or their built in Ubuntu One music store or something? This just seems wrong.

Re:Freetards think that software development is fr

[walkswithwolf]

"Developing software costs time and money" agreed on this point, but 80+% of the software used by Ubuntu was not developed by Canonical. So you really are paying Canonical to use software that someone else developed and is not getting a cent.

"The reality is that if you find something valuable then you should be willing to pay for it either through ads or a flat fee otherwise you are a freeloader/leach/lamer." So you are saying that any derivative distribution is a leach...and since Ubuntu is a Debian derivative, Ubuntu is a leach.

There is a difference between being a software developer and being a distribution maintainer. One writes and maintains software and the other collects software written by others and packages for a particular OS/distribution.

I think, if the ad revenue that Ubuntu will/plans on getting was distributed to every software package used by Ubuntu, there would be less issues.

Wow

[holophrastic]

Windows has been sold with literal pounds of adware installed by OEMs, but at least the OS itself has always been clean. This story honestly stuns me. I've never heard of an operating system advertizing to the user directly. That's like my car reading me an ad every time I pull into my driveway.

Re:Wow

[ceoyoyo]

Amazon did it with the Kindle. I think some of the other ebook reader companies did as well with their Android flavours.

Re:Oh look!

[green1]

how often does the average user fvisit the offical distro website. How often does that same user use the dash.
I think that should answer which one I'd prefer. (hint, I don't care what they advertise on their offical site, I only will likely see that once)

Crapware

[Borg Bucolic]

I left Microsoft because of it, I didn't like Unity because of it, I've left Ubuntu because of it.

So crapware comes to Ubuntu...

[Just Brew It!]

Never thought I'd need to remove pre-installed crapware from a Linux system (needing to remove early versions of Network Manager a few years back doesn't count).

My original plan was to switch to Kubuntu when I finally ditch Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. But given the direction they seem to be heading in, I may reconsider and go with a straight Debian system instead.

I don't like Ubuntu any more.

[GigaBurglar]

Not that I liked it in the first place but recent events have forced me to reconsider their motives. I usually install Ubuntu for family members but now I will migrate them to a less unscrupulous distro.

sudo apt-get uninstall annoying-ads

[billstewart]

And it it responds "Sorry, Dave, I can't do that", then I'm formatting the drive...

Re:sudo apt-get uninstall annoying-ads

[Knuckles]

Um, no, it uninstalls the package.

Re:Free with every Amazon order

[dadelbunts]

Its easier than that! Make an account. Click to disable ads. Thanks slashdot!

Re:The nerd rage around here is unbelievable

[multiplexo]

Canonical have provided the community with a polished and free OS

Free yes, polished? Are you fucking kidding me? I can tell that you've never used Ubuntu for any serious server work. If you had you'd know that it's anything but polished. Take the Upstart init manager as an example. In theory Upstart was supposed to replace the old SYS V init scripts with a leaner, event driven mechanism for system start up. In practice it has done anything but. Some services start through Upstart, some start through init.d and others, such as sshd have different behavior depending upon whether or not you control them via upstart or start and stop them via init.d. Then there's the fact that the braindead dildos who wrote Upstart set it up so that it kills services via kill -9. Yeah, because nothing bad could ever happen if you ran kill -9 to shut your database down, which is exactly what Upstart does when you run

stop mysql

Apparently no one at Canonical understands that "kill -9" is something that you use only as a last resort and certainly isn't something you want to use when you're stopping and starting a database. Then there's the piece of shit Plymouth boot manager. Guess what, servers don't need splash screens. Really, they don't. My servers live in remote sites or are hosted in the cloud. I don't need a cutesy picture when they start, I want screen after screen of detailed output telling me what the system is doing. But go ahead and try to remove Plymouth from your Ubuntu system. Guess what! You can't. Some useless son-of-a-crack-whore set up the package dependencies such that attempting to remove Plymouth, which is a real piece of shit from an Ubuntu system also removes the core system.

Then there's ureadahead. Ureadahead is an OK idea on laptops I guess but does nothing for you when you're on a server and I've started disabling it on the systems I run. Interestingly enough despite ureadahead's supposed performance benefits I haven't seen any penalty for doing so. I could go on and on and on, the out of date rsyslog that ships with Ubuntu (yeah, because collecting log information is boring and old school, who needs that stuff?), bugs in mdraid that cause it to incorrectly detect disk size when it creates your disk label, thus creating a ticking time bomb that can go off and result in massive file corruption, etc, etc, etc. Oh, and the Ubuntu desktop, what a piece of shit. I'd take Windows XP over this POS any day of the week. Newsflash Ubuntu developers, larding your desktop up with shiny crap doesn't make it more useful. The Gnome and Unity UIs are every bit as bloated and stupid as the Windows Vista UI and if any real functionality or value has been added I have yet to see what it is. Gnome and Unity are nothing more than a shiny coat of paint on top of a nasty, stinky turd.

About a year ago I set up a desktop using straight Debian, and it was fucking amazing. Shit just worked and I realized that the only reason why Ubuntu has been able to stay in business so long is because they've been able to ride on Debian's coat tails and that even though they're idiots they haven't been able to fuck up the solid work that the folks at Debian have done over the years. This cartoon describes Ubuntu best.

http://www.xkcd.com/424/#

This article is FUD

[bkerensa]

Here is my response to this article: http://benjaminkerensa.com/2012/09/22/lots-of-hype-over-shopping-lens-in-ubuntu-12-10

Right time to do it.... uefi secure boot.

[Tanuki64]

The ad routines will be added to the kernel. If you remove them it won't boot anymore because it is not signed anymore.

@JaredOfEuropa - Re:Profit!

[nukenerd]

Funny, but your sig is really appropriate for this situation. Let's tweak it a bit :-

"Distros are like babies' diapers; they should be changed often, and for the same reason."

I changed from Ubuntu to Mepis four weeks ago.

Re:Free with every Amazon order

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing I find disgusting with this move is not that I see ads, it's that I'll see ads when I'm not 'using the web'. If I open a text editor (to edit some source code or whatever) and I start seeing crap associated with Amazon....it's a distraction I don't need. I tolerate ads on webpages because of a few things:

1) I don't own the website - it's their space.
2) I agree that they're allowed to "farm revenue" however they wish and splash all sorts of sweet-goodness or foul ads as long as I'm on their site.

However, you wouldn't let Sears, Wal-mart or any other company looking to generate revenue by installing an apparatus in your home to simply serve ads, would you? And don't get snippy and mention the TV - that's a different beast.

I purchased my PC/LT to do work for me - not some ad agency.

That being said, yes, there are similarities between TV ads and Ubuntu with ads. But, your TV doesn't show ads in the middle of your DVD/BD which interrupt the story-line, does it? Didn't think so.

So, no. Canonical and Amazon are stepping over the line on this one.

just my 2 cents.

Re:The nerd rage around here is unbelievable

[afgam28]

Admittedly I've never used Ubuntu on a server. Every time I've had to set up a server, I needed to go with Red Hat.

I was only talking about desktop Linux. Ubuntu server won't be affected by this, because it doesn't have unity or any gui installed anyway.

Tube people

[bothandeach]

Google is now heavily laced with Ads, now Canonical. I think Canonical is selling out, and I think the whole web is getting too damn commercial. Everyone has been trained by TV I guess.

Ubuntu: Where do you want to go today?

[Xeleema]

Long touted as "the" Linux distribution for the desktop, but I just don't see it.
Just like any new distribution, when Ubuntu hit the streets I checked it out. Just the "mood" of the developers turned me off.
Let me clarify - I'm all for making things more user-friendly, and maybe I'm too old-school UNIX, but there's a difference between making something easier to use, and making it retard-proof.
When their forums became crowded with a hundred posts for the exact. Same. Problem. I warned my friends and family.
When the slew of Ubuntu-specific tools, GUIs, and How-Tos washed over the documentation. I distanced myself.
Now, with their community of perpetual noobs, their isolated walled-garden of features/docs/development, they finally think they've "locked-in" enough users to start this kind of nonesense.
Ad-Supported is just a spin-doctor's way of saying "Fuck You, GNU".

Re:Adbuntu

[cOldhandle]

Last time I installed Mint, it had modified Firefox so that built in Google search would kick back some money to the Mint team with referrals. This is a pretty similar situation - easy to remove, and IMHO a reasonable method to support a free distro (I doubt many people donate).

Re:Free with every Amazon order

[CalcProgrammer1]

The big issue here is that AdBlockPlus works for Slashdot, not so much for these intrusive operating system ads. As a whole, Unity is garbage, and Canonical is a greedy monster of corruption evolved from a nice, community supporting company who took a trip to the loony bin sometime in 2010 and hasn't come back.

Such hatred!

[Microlith]

The unmitigated hatred against Canonical for trying to find a way to generate income so that they can stay in business and continue developing Ubuntu is amazing. What the hell else do you expect them to do? If they offered a way to buy a copy I'm sure we'd have an equally trollish, hate filled thread here on Slashdot.

Re:Such hatred!

[EmagGeek]

Not agreeing with someone's course of action is not equal to "hate."

We throw around the word "hate" way too much. It's not "hate."

Re:Such hatred!

[Nyder]

The unmitigated hatred against Canonical for trying to find a way to generate income so that they can stay in business and continue developing Ubuntu is amazing. What the hell else do you expect them to do? If they offered a way to buy a copy I'm sure we'd have an equally trollish, hate filled thread here on Slashdot.

This is because you are stupid and can't see the big picture.

Do you want every linux disto to have ads? How about paying for an ad free version of your favorite distro? Or the reputation that will follow as Linux because knows as the Ad Infested OS?

Re:Such hatred!

[Osgeld]

if they didnt continue pissing off their userbase they wouldn't have to resort to this , I don't care about ubuntu, I don't get the massive amount of respect they DO get for taking debian + popular apps and sticking them on a disk. I do get that they could care less about their users, and therefore why should I

Re:quite a large exploit vector

[TaoPhoenix]

"The biggest deal for me is that ads are quite a large exploit vector. I block ads in my browser because I consider them to be from an untrusted source. If these are simply text and PNG, then perhaps it's not so bad."

Good, after scanning most of the thread, you're one of the few looking at the security side. I'll presume that Canonical won't allow a full fledged virus attack, but if ads are in fact integrated into the OS and not just "a web store" or whatever, I think that creates data leak risks that could have really nasty implications.

Since everyone is playing with tablet-phone ideas for OSes, I'll say that some of the ads on some of the free versions of my iPhone apps ARE intrusive. They're sandwiched between parts of the app, so when you reach for a settings or menu button, your finger hits the ad instead, and "poof" - you're ripped away from your app and then get to burn 15 seconds while the App store triggered by the ad loads up. It gets VERY intrusive, VERY fast.

Complain now, or you will get overrun by ads!!!

[Nyder]

I'm going to give you some advice. This is based on history.

If you do NOT complain about the ads in Ubuntu now it's going to get worse. Way worse. This is a toe testing the water. Make the water way the fuck too cold now. If not, you will find, in probably a year, the every linux distro will have ads, and not only in small places. It will ruin linux.

You think I'm wrong? oh no, the greed of the people say this will not stop and only get worse.

This will ruin linux for ever. People will associate linux with ads. MS will say, by a Ad Free OS, not Ad Infested Linux. And worse, Linux distros will start selling Ad Free versions.

Re:Complain now, or you will get overrun by ads!!!

[couchslug]

Eventually, distros like Debian will be good enough for ordinary users that transititional "training wheels" distros will be less needed.

Let's not forget that Mandrake, Corel, and their successors existed because of shortcomings of "purist" distros from the perspective of users who wanted to Get Shit Done.

When no one needs Ubuntu, it will go away.

Re:Free with every Amazon order

[gl4ss]

I'm pretty sure slashdot isn't sending me adverts to my mail based on what I write on my posts, but that might be because I got the wrong email address set.

hot babes tight asses goth babes (gotta try!)

Re:The nice thing about Linux

[jbicha]

Just like how Unity haters destroyed Ubuntu in 2011. Oh wait, they didn't. Ubuntu has even more users in 2012 than they did in 2010.

Re:Freetards think that software development is fr

[jbicha]

Sure. The Amazon search results can easily be removed for a flat fee of $0.

Try others, too

[TheSeatOfMyPants]

There are plenty of great non-U distros, both user- & expert-friendly. I migrated when a 10.04 upgrade made my system unbootable, as I was already frustrated with the direction Canonical was going (this was during "we don't care what you want" window-button fiasco). I had been afraid to try any non-Ubuntu-based distros because of the myth that it's the only user-friendly option, but had nothing to lose -- and I soon discovered that I really liked many of the other well-known & not so well-known ones.

Re:Try others, too

[wvmarle]

I'm a long-term user of Mandriva, until about 2009-10. Ubuntu became very popular, and I basically jumped on the bandwagon, tried it out at home, was happy with it, realised they have LTS versions, and started using it for my business too (those computers I don't want to change OSes for - it has to work, and as long as it does what I need it to do I'm happy, and Ubuntu 10.04LTS is doing just that).

The problem is that I've the feeling this lovely distro doesn't have much of a future. I don't understand it, it used to be the easiest to use distro. Looking rather pretty (not brown at least), with it's well working URPMI software management and it's control panel.

From experience in your position, SimplyMepis

[TheSeatOfMyPants]

I was in the same position 2.5 years ago -- I don't know which distros you tried, but the one that has turned out to be the most user-friendly (and have the nicest community) is SimplyMepis. It's Debian-based, so it uses the easiest package manager I've found (Synaptic/.deb), and they set up the desktop environment (KDE4) to be easy enough for total newbies to use.

For what it's worth, I usually describe myself as a half-geek... I find technology fascinating & enjoy learning Linux -- but my brain doesn't work in the way needed to even combine terminal commands, as it's more geared for the humanities (writing fiction, sociology, psychology, etc.).

Bye bye

[EmperorOfCanada]

Is this an Onion story or dey just be stupid? These morons are one google search (Better than Ubuntu) away from losing every technowiz in the business. If you read my posts you will see that I really don't like MBAs. But this has to be a case study in letting an MBA loose in your company with a spreadsheet program (Probably Excel).

Ubuntu, you can save yourself. Step one: Find this super bright MBA and send it packing. Step two: undo anything this MBA did.

Updated

[bkerensa]

I wanted to note that I updated my blog and linked to a screenshot of one user who searched for "Amazon Kindle Fire" the suggestions/ads whatever you would like to call them have only been showing up for some even if you have the latest unity-lens-shopping package.

Some insights by Dr.Sheldon Cooper..

[sky770]

Strike 1: no out of box support for my ATI Riva TNT 2 GPU (64MB dedicated memory) for my Intel Pentium4 Desktop (when Ubuntu 7.x series was released).

Strike 2: byebye default Gnome desktop..hello Unity..? blarrghh :x

*Strike 3*: Amazon ads integrated into unity? :O

That's strike 3 Canonical! :|

Funny nerd rage..

[formfeed]

Reading through your nerd rage, I thought "how insightful" (i.e. exactly what I think) but then I imagined you addressing Shuttleworth -
represented by an empty chair.

Re:Free with every Amazon order

[bmo]

>ghostery

"I'm afraid of teh spyware botnets, so i'm going to add a spyware botnet to tell me about spyware botnets"

Really, that's what ghostery is. It's an ad company.

--
BMO

Re:Aha!

[Knuckles]

It all comes clear now.

If one can only single-task, then any adware shown cannot be ignored. It might be dismissed, but not hidden. In a multi-windowed world with minimization, shading (rollups) these ads might be skipped easily.

Canonical is learning.

The wrong thing.

Disclosure: I have never installed any flavor of Ubuntu, but I have used Mepis, Mint, Ultimate and Bodhi, all based on Ubuntu.

Except of course that multitasking is just fine in Unity including minimize and roll-up, and arguably better in places than it ever was before, like the improved Alt+Tab and Alt+`

Same as in different

[unixisc]

Only true when you are talking about distros within the same 'family'. Such as Debian/Ubuntu/Mint/Zorin/Trisquel, or Fedora/Mageia/PCLinuxOS/Scientific Linux/Blag/Rosa, or Slackware/Vector Linux/Slackel/Salix, or Arch/Chakra/Frugalware/Manjaro. If you are switching within these sets, it's probably not a big deal. But if you are going from, say Mageia to Trisquel, or Chakra to Vector Linux or something like that, then it is. B'cos different base distros change things in very basic places, such as in the /etc. For instance, in RHEL, I can do system-config-network to configure a network, and service network restart to restart it. What do I do under Debian? Or Arch? Or Ubuntu? Or Gentoo?

Wrong way to do it

[DrXym]

It's already annoying that Ubuntu wastes half of the dash suggesting apps that I *don't* have installed on my machine without showing ads too. Stick all that shit in a tab of its own where people are more likely to accept the ads anyway.

Putting them anywhere else is inviting people to use another distribution.

Unity does not force maximized windows

[Compaqt]

Wait, I don't know why the guy you responded to said you can only have one window visible at a time in Unity. Who claims that?

That's what I've been hearing about Gnome3, but certainly not Unity (if you've used it).

Unity does not force you to have only one window open in any way whatsoever. Window management is basically just like Ubuntu 10.04, except that when you minimize, it goes to the left bar instead of the bottom bar.

You can have whatever number of windows you want on the screen in whatever configuration: maximized, unmaximized, etc. Only one monitor or multiple. Monitors cloned or one big workspace. And multiple virtual desktops.

Re:Unity does not force maximized windows

[Osgeld]

in gnome 3 it acts like it wants to be a single app at a time full screen experiance, but people are naturally not retarded, honestly what it feells like to me is old Mac OS, you have an open app list you can thumb though or you can find the window yourself, course if you were a good little robot all your apps would be full screen, that way you can see the spiffy animations.

Re:Unity does not force maximized windows

[Compaqt]

Right, but that's the Gnome Shell interface from Gnome.

That's not how it works in Unity on Ubuntu.

Canonical can't survive much longer

[humanrev]

It seems to me that Canonical have chosen this path as a desperate last resort. No-one involved in the open-source world would, in their right mind, attempt to show advertising within their software unless all other sources of revenue had failed. I know Canonical have tried to get OEMs on board, tried their Ubuntu TV approach (of which, apart from its initial announcement, we've seen nothing), have tried to target the enterprise (of which Red Hat has the Linux side of things securely locked up for now), and have even tried a cloud storage solution with Ubuntu One (of which even that failed considering the widespread mindshare of Dropbox, iCloud and even SkyDrive).

So it's come to this. One could argue that Canonical has to do this since Ubuntu is free, and if they tried charging for it, people would move onto something else. This would definitely happen, so what do they do to get a steady stream of revenue before the whole company collapses? I honestly don't know, but Red Hat abandoned the desktop market and surely the corpses of previous attempts at a mainstream Linux desktop distro have shown that it's not financially sustainable and it's a wasted endeavor to try to run a company primarily based off developing a free operating system... UNLESS you have secured a niche somewhere which people are ready to pay decent money for. Red Hat has; Canonical hasn't.

BTW - I'm not saying Canonical are trying to get rich off of Ubuntu (although as a business it would be nice). The problem is that developing a mainstream desktop is fucking hard work, what with all the potential configurations and hardware out there. Even with community help it's a herculean effort that only megacorps like Microsoft and Apple could really tackle. Canonical simply doesn't have the resources... but they try. But it still needs SOME sort of revenue to keep people employed to work on things, and obviously what they're getting right now is not enough, if they've had to resort to affiliates in this way. This is going to be the final straw though.

Re:Free with every Amazon order

[MasterOfGoingFaster]

On Slashdot, all I have to do is check the box "Disable Ads". But I don't because I want to support Slashdot. I use it, and I know all to well that it costs money to provide the service.

Some upsides to Unity

[Compaqt]

Yeah, I was one of those people. If you take away an existing workflow without allowing people to recreate it in the new system, people are going to be upset.

The initial versions of Unity were horrible, and seemingly confused as to who they were trying to target.

As for ditching Gnome, it's the Gnome "team" that's responsible for that, dropping what wasn't broken. Anyway, since Gnome was moving to Gnome3 Ubuntu came out with Unity.

The reason I'm using Ubuntu is because I (and most startups) believe it to be a better server than RHell. RHell usually has really old versions, and very little packages compared to Ubuntu. And if you're using it on the server, it's easier to use it on the desktop as well. That, too, in stock form when it's not just yourself in the office.

As for why you might want to try Unity: Better workflow (but you won't know unless you've tried it). As a developer I'm juggling all sorts of windows, often tens of browser windows depending on what I'm researching. Anyway, a common scenario is switching between a Chrome window and a text editor/vim/whatever. OK, now I want to switch back to that Chrome window. Good luck finding it in the grouped task list in the Gnome2 bottom panel. It sorts them alphabetically, which means you're guessing where your MRU (most recently used) item is on the sort. It's not easy and fast. It's click on the list and start reading to find your window.

And the Alt+Tab is not inflexible like Gnome3 seemed to be. You can walk the applications list, and then change modes to walk the windows list of a given application, and change back. It also changes modes automatically if you stay on a given app with multiple windows. Definitely try it, I think you'll like it. And it doesn't baby you like Gnome3 (with no minimize, only one app at a time).

Finally, there's a myth (probably encouraged by Ubuntu) that Unity is great for noobs. I disagree. Noobs might actually find some parts good, some hard. It's a great desktop for power users and developers, though. You just have to learn it.

For example, there was a time when it was thought you could only have one window of a program open at a time. However, in the latest version, you just middle-click (a la Firefox) to open a new window of, say, the file manager. Nice, cool, and not something you could do with the bottom panel in Gnome2. Again, you can have multiple windows of an app open, unlike early impressions of what Unity was going to be like.

That's not to say everything's great. I think the skinny scrollbars may be hard for noobs to figure out, though you can turn those off if you want.

Re:Free with every Amazon order

[MasterOfGoingFaster]

Yeah, I thought about that. An installer that made a backup of user data would help. But I've run across a lot of users who tell me they got a new computer and can't find their files. When I tell them the files would still be on the old PC, they often say "but I've already thrown it away!"

But yeah - Amazon might take some heat if the installer didn't warn them (and perhaps check for/backup data).

What's so bad about this?

[ZeroMS]

A FOSS Operating System such as ubuntu needs $$ to maintain its quality, like it or not. You can download it for free, and you can even play around with the source code. You get what you pay for. Plus, if enough revenue comes in through ubuntu, Amazon will take note and if future commercial relations happen between them, that could only mean a rise in ubuntu's (and by extension linux/gnu/FOSS) popularity. Ubuntu-powered ebook readers anyone?

Re:What's so bad about this?

[petteyg359]

I wouldn't use "Ubuntu" and "quality" in the same sentence like that...

Re:Free with every Amazon order

[MasterOfGoingFaster]

I'm not sure this is a good analogy. I think we can agree that things we pay for should not have ads. Ads might be acceptable for things that are free or highly subsidized (to the point of being nearly free).

I pay for cable TV, yet I still get the damn ads. Unlike Ubuntu, I can't turn those off. That's annoying and they are about to lose me as a customer.

Magazines and newspapers are not free, but are ad-subsidized.

On-the-air TV (you brought it up) and web sites are ad supported. Since Ubuntu is "free" then ads are not unacceptable to many of us - as long as we can easily turn them off.

Looking at the cost of a non-free OS (Windows), you are getting quite a deal with Ubuntu. Like Slashdot, it is pretty easy to turn off ads. So I think this is more of a "Spirit of FOSS" issue than anything else.

Vote with your wallet. Pick another distro like Mint and watch the Ubuntu experiment and see if it works. Or if the pain of switching is too great, just turn off the ads. I'm OK with the non-geek masses subsidizing my OS.

Re:Aha!

[Compaqt]

I agree that multitasking is better than ever, but I haven't been able to find rollup. How do you do that? When I doubleclick a titlebar it maximizes the window.

Re:Aha!

[Knuckles]

Oh sorry, I've had that for so long I've started to think it's in the defaults. Install Ubuntu Tweak, it's there under the Windows options. And there are many other things you can customize there without mucking about in compizconfig-settings-manager. If you are on a release prior to 12.10 (Quantal), you may want to install MyUnity as well (needs a PPA IIRC). In Quantal, the interesting MyUnity features have been merged into Ubuntu Tweak

Re:To what?

[unixisc]

I thought that Mint was currently tied to Duck-duck-go.

Re:quite a large exploit vector

[TaoPhoenix]

Oh I agree, the pure Linux Kernel is pretty solid.

However they could be grafted in the custom layers that Ubuntu is grafting on top such as Unity.

So now we are going to get spammed in our Free OS?

[davidorourke]

This comment was made by me: David ORourke: I was logged in too, so there was a mysql error when i was logging in as well. so Mr. Support Guy, please examine your database for errors please. by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 23, @01:50PM (#41429455) To me...all ads are nothing but spam. They have no influence at all whether we buy this or that. All commercials and any ads are to me and many others nothing but a spam ploy to shirt tail tug on your skirttails to say: Hey looky at what we have....... If i need something to drive...i know where the dealerships are...i dont have to watch tv to see the latest greatest deal....i can go to the dealership and straight out ask them. They push these ads in your supposed free operating system, because they want to make Pay per click money from Google....These ads may be Amazon ads, but they are from the Google adsense and tuned for Amazon. Who really is making the money from those ads. Is it going to fund more developments of Ubuntu? I am waiting for the GnomeBuntu.....Pure Gnome Distro...if it has Amazon ads...i will go through the system and remove all I see.....I dont like being spammed in my emails, spammed on my TV and damn sure dont wanna be spammed in my own free operating system. I turn all spammers in..and do my best to report them to their hosting and they get stopped temporarily till they get a new hosting account. But I in almost all my emails I own....maybe 43 all together...dont get spammed but maybe once a day by one or 2 people now.....because i figured out how to look at the headers and do my research and find who sent it,,,and then report them properly. Namecheep.....couldnt care less if their members spam people,,,,thats why my next agenda is to have namecheep took down by the government......spam is not to be tolerated by me or anyone else. Over seas, they play all the commercials (spam ) early in the morning......most people are at work....the wives who dont work, but work at home,,,get more house work done,,,because they aret sitting in front of the tv watching soap operas. All that dont get played till the evening when people are home. i say all commercials should be played after midnight and stopped after 7am.....the rest of the day should be filled with movies and comedies to keep us laughing because we know laughter is the best medicine. What do you all think? I want some feedback. Give it to my everyone and everyone. I first posted this I was logged in but when it posted it posted as annonymous coward... I hate that. Because i am never anonymous

ya how many ways can this go wrong

[BigLonn]

Sadly yes and Cannonical does have to pay people to support Ubuntu, however I don't like or use Amazon, I never trusted Amazon and will never use them unless someone puts gun to my head! That said I think this is a marketing mistake and it will boomerang right up the side of canonicals head and further drive disgruntled ubuntu users like I used to be to mepis or Linux mint

Re:The nerd rage around here is unbelievable

[kumanopuusan]

To be fair, if you wanted your database to do anything sane, you shouldn't have installed mysql. Real databases can recover without data corruption when server processes are killed.

"they are done" -- you can say that again

[Burz]

Advertising == spyware in this day and age, so yes I am finished with Ubuntu. This sort of thing seemed OK when Lindows was around, because there was still some pretense of decency and respect for privacy back then. Now it's all about no-holds-barred surveillance with the extra dollop of whipped cream and double-cherry on top in the form of warrant-less demands for data from the government.

Blocking ads used to be about readability; getting rid of the writhing, flashing, insane pools of upchuck that also brought many systems to a crawl and then became a prime vector for malware infection. It used to involve scraping the crud out of Windows, or using Ablock, or switching to Linux. Now it means switching distros.

Some of it isn't Fedora's fault per se...

[Burz]

Ever tried to run *any* RHEL-related distro on a Macbook? No, wait, don't do it unless you want to bake your CPU.

Where to from here?

[javawocky]

Ok, I accept it, the writing has been on the wall for some time, but my beloved Ubuntu is sinking fast. Which Distro is the next best? I want my apt-get install and not have to fiddle with X config ever again - Suggestions?

If you don't like it...

[Yvanhoe]

...just make an install with all the same packages except these ads and distribute them. That's how open source works. Complaints about such trivial things in OSS should not be taken seriously.

It's worth repeating again:

[Zanadou]

*You* are the product.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

Willful ignorance?

[rbprbp]

I notice that people claiming to be "Linux geeks" don't know (or willfully forget) that they can, instead of whining endlessly: 1. remove this ads lens 2. use any desktop environment or distro they damn well please. But then, this is not as fun as complaining.

Oh well.

[Captain.Abrecan]

Years of hard work down the drain. What a shame.

Ubuntu with "guidence" from commercial interests..

[evolutionary]

All jokes aside, this could damage Ubuntu's reputation. It basically tells the Linux and potential MS converts that Ubuntu is no better than Apple (and to a lessor extent Microsoft). Including tools that directly guide your usage to the benefit of a commercial interest may be considered intrusive by some. Also the Unity Desktop has suffered from usability and stability issues that have kept more informed people from using it,; some sticking to Ubuntu 11 or others going to alternative distros. Which leads to the the subject that not enough people talking about: alternative user friendly distros to Ubuntu. I myself don't find Ubuntu to be wonderfully user friendly and have had stability problems creep in. Linux Mint http://www.linuxmint.com/ I find more user friendly and stable so I recommend it to friends and clients. SolusOS http://www.solusos.com/ is new but look VERY promising based on Debian. I've used pure Debian in office environments with no learning curve complaints by the employees. Of course Fedora is loved by many although more bleeding edge. Linux Mint in particular is gaining more press among Linux users and potential converts whereas Ubuntu has gotten some not so positive press with the new Unity usability/speed/drivers/integration problems and now this rather close partnership with Amazon on the OS level. Ubuntu and Linux in general does not have a market share near big enough that people will forgive annoyances like this. At least with laptops preinstalled junk is relatively easy if annoying to remove. Perhaps that is so with Ubuntu 12 as well, but why should bother a more user friendly distros is available that doesn't play these games?

Linux Minx uses default search engines of those who contribute money to the OS to generate revenue and I find that perfectly acceptable. You can also add the bigger search engines with ease and its no more intrusive than MS IE 7/8's default search engine.

I feel as if Ubuntu is pushing the limits of including "features" in a similar way Microsoft did in stages: first with WGA in XP, then with the Protected Media Path and its "dial home" feature under the pretense of telling you "you are online" with the "Network Connectivity Status Indicator" (which dials to www.msftncsi.com and can only be disabled with a registry hack as there is no admin interface to change this behavior). MS is playing similar games with MS Office: WGA-like "features", the "ribbon" interface everyone HATES (pushing many to Libre/Open Office), and dramatic price increases to push home/SMB users to buy the cloud subscription model via Office 360. These "features" are of no benefit to the user, are often a detriment (especially to privacy) and/or consume excessive resources at a minimum. The WGA with XP was enough to drive me to Linux and I've been very happy with my move.

The Unity issues are piling up and this new one may hurt Linux advancement in general. I'm certain it will hurt Ubuntu acceptance with the informed Linux community. there are alternatives. Its starting to look as though Ubuntu's previous popularity has made it a bit arrogant and complacent with its user base, similar to Microsoft and Apple. While some may correctly argue that fragmentation can hurt Linux, in some ways its also its strength, so long as core standards aren't broken. This could be a clear example.

enough

[osmosys]

Will everyone stop freaking out already! Really! This isn't a big deal!