Ubuntu Asks Users To Pay What They Want

New submitter major_lima sends this excerpt from Ars: "When a typical user downloads Ubuntu for free and installs it on a computer with a Windows license that the user did pay for, Canonical gets nothing in the form of payment. There's nothing wrong with that — this is the open source world, after all, and many people contribute to Ubuntu with code rather than money. But starting this week, Canonical is presenting desktop OS downloaders with an optional donation form. ... 'Pay what you think it's worth,' and 'Show Ubuntu some love' are among the messages users will see, and downloaders can direct their donations to specific parts of Ubuntu development. ... Once you donate, the Ubuntu desktop starts downloading. Or, you can just skip the donation and download the OS for free, just as you always could. For some reason, the donation page is not presented to Ubuntu Server users."

Comments

Can I Fund Unity a Negative Amount?

[macromorgan]

Just a thought... I still wish Cannonical would have put its resources towards helping make Gnome Shell better as opposed to taking its ball and going home.

Re:Can I Fund Unity a Negative Amount?

[Desler]

Yeah because the GNOME people are well-known for collaborating with others and being open to criticism. Oh wait... Why should anyone want to work with a project whose team is filled with a bunch of pigheaded people to whom NIH syndrome is a way of life?

Re:Can I Fund Unity a Negative Amount?

[binarylarry]

I was a unity hater as well. But 12.10's Unity interface is pretty fantastic (I've been running the beta for a little over a week).

Re:Can I Fund Unity a Negative Amount?

[X0563511]

I'd rather they took BOTH out back and shot them.

Re:Can I Fund Unity a Negative Amount?

[Grishnakh]

This is what you get when you have a system where there's no configurability, and everything has to be hard-coded one way only: if you want to do anything slightly different, you have to fork the whole project.

If they had just gone with KDE instead, they could have made their own "plasma" variant or had a different set of configuration options (and even added new features selectable in the configuration options), and the KDE team would have been happy to accept these changes for inclusion.

Re:Can I Fund Unity a Negative Amount?

[maxwell demon]

That argument would have made sense if Ubuntu had switched to another standard system, like KDE, Xfce, or whatever. But they went on making their own. If there's one company who cannot complain to others about NIH syndrome, it's Canonical.

Re:Can I Fund Unity a Negative Amount?

[binarylarry]

I'd say the most immediate change was the performance. Unity just performed horrifically for me before and I use fairly high end hardware (Intel i7 series processors, Nvidia GPUs, etc). That was a huge turn off.

I also found that the older Unity had all kinds of odd usability oddities and problems (sometimes various window management features didn't work, parts of unity would crash and I'd have to logout or reboot, etc).

So it was essentially a shuddering clusterfuck that actually impeded my work.

So far the new version is fast, just works and most importantly stays out of my way. Most of the time I don't see much OS UI, just my apps (which is how things should be IMO).

Re:Can I Fund Unity a Negative Amount?

[gfxguy]

Thanks. It still doesn't seem usable (from my perspective). It wasn't bugs, it was design... I like seeing several apps at once, and I have a large screen to accomodate it... Unitiy just doesn't seem designed for large screens.

Re:Can I Fund Unity a Negative Amount?

[maxdread]

As a counter point, if they found that Gnome was suddenly going in a direction that didn't serve their or their users needs and the Gnome team refused to work with them it makes sense to switch correct?

Now, the same problem they ran into with the Gnome team can easily happen with the above projects, they have little say in how they evolve and in which direction they go and it simply leaves them open to being screwed with again the future. It makes a lot of sense to simply run with your own project.

Re:Can I Fund Unity a Negative Amount?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, isn't this is why Linux Mint is forking Gnome into their own desktop interface? Isn't it called Cinnamon?

Re:Can I Fund Unity a Negative Amount?

[gfxguy]

My work environment has at least three applications open (also on a 30" monitor); they do not even overlap, but fit perfectly together and fill the screen (I am anal retentive that way). Unity simply wouldn't work.

Re:Can I Fund Unity a Negative Amount?

[lister king of smeg]

they are getting flak not for forking or rolling their own but for putting an immature gui on most used linux desktop, they are getting flax for the same thing gnome has as well not listening to users and having a sever case of NIH syndrome.

Re:Can I Fund Unity a Negative Amount?

[gfxguy]

But then the unified menu doesn't work well because I also like sloppy focus (focus follows mouse). I'm not just bitching - I tried out 11.04 for two months - that's a really fair test, and it just didn't work for me; I tried to conform and just get accustomed to it, and just couldn't. For the same reasons I dislike the Mac UI, too.

Re:Can I Fund Unity a Negative Amount?

[Grishnakh]

Kubuntu is pretty well-known as being not well maintained due to lack of developers; basically, someone just slapped the vanilla KDE packages on top of Ubuntu and called it "done". It works, but it's not an official release at all (it is not maintained at all by Canonical, only a volunteer), and could really be a lot better.

If you want Ubuntu under the hood with KDE, Linux Mint KDE Edition is a better choice.

I wonder how much of this will go upstream?

[pointyhat]

I wonder how much of this cash will go to the real heroes i.e. upstream people like Debian? Canonical is just a reseller/ISV as they call them in the market.

Re:I wonder how much of this will go upstream?

[thetoadwarrior]

I assume most of it goes to someone else, seeing how the bottom option is basically a "give it to Canonical" option. But with their defaults, they appear to want you to give a little to everyone.

Re:I wonder how much of this will go upstream?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want, you can always donate $$$ directly to Debian and some associated free software like PostgreSQL or FFmpeg. These donations are not used to pay for developer time. They are generally used to reimburse some of the travel costs associated with things like Debconf for the poorer developers, hardware costs for developer machines (something more recent) etc.

http://www.spi-inc.org/donations/

Debian is just one of the members of SPI. There are other software that benefits too,

http://www.spi-inc.org/projects/

And if you are suspicious that SPI is not associated with Debian, just look at Debian's donations page and be happy.

http://www.debian.org/donations

Cheers!
Anonymous Debian Dev.

PS. $$$ is not a big problem for Debian (as everything is either sponsored or volunteered), but it is always welcome.

Re:I wonder how much of this will go upstream?

[AvitarX]

I thought they were pretty big on desktop projects. Upstart was pretty popular for a spell with a few distros (though not as much anymore), also the xwindows replacement I believe they are funding.

additionally unity (love it or hate it) is an ubuntu project, and they contribute to sub sonic.

linux is more than a kernel, and I would suspect the kernel met their needs 5 years ago, they are contributing upstream and making their own projects in the user space.

this myth that ubuntu does nothing is annoying and wrong, just as would be true if one said that about fedora (not red hat), slackware, debian, etc.

Re:I wonder how much of this will go upstream?

[Yvanhoe]

Canonical is the missing link, the "last mile" we have been wishing for decades in the linux world. Yes, they "only" pickup the good packages, they "only" make sure that your experience is smooth, and they "only" do some marketing. And these things are the "only" things that linux was lacking to become a success on desktops/laptops

I'm OK with this

[helixcode123]

I use it daily for my work and the kid's machine runs it. I'll drop them some $$$ next time.

Re:Amazon ads

[Knuckles]

No need to, you can turn it off anyway, in Privacy settings.

I just hope they don't get discouraged

[KingSkippus]

I just hope they don't get discouraged at the number of downloads and installations that don't receive donations. I suspect that a lot of people are like me--they don't mind throwing a few bucks their way (or even a few dozen), but we tend to install, reinstall, set up virtual machines, install yet again, and so on across dozens of machines. I might give a one-off donation, but I'm not going to donate every time I install a copy of Ubuntu.

That's one of the things that's so damn frustrating about Windows and why Ubuntu (or really, any Linux distribution) is so useful. Windows is an awesome OS and I don't mind paying the license fee to run it, but I don't have a few thousand dollars to install it on each of my hobbyist VMs I use for development and testing stuff. Back in the days when I could just use my product code to install it willy-nilly on a few dozen machines, each of which I probably run for a few days and then reinstall for some new reason, it's not that big a deal. But now that everything phones home and nags the hell out of you and denies you service to what you bought, it's not such an appealing option. Hopefully Microsoft will someday realize that they're actively driving people like me away from Windows, but until then, I'll happily cast my lot with Ubuntu instead.

Re:I just hope they don't get discouraged

[Anonymous Coward]

Get an MSDN OS subscription.

Re:I just hope they don't get discouraged

[Anonymous Coward]

For $700, which only lasts 12 months, and then you have to throw down another $500 every year to keep it up? That's still an absolute shit solution compared to what we could do with Windows XP (and earlier), and can do even easier with the likes of Linux distros such as Ubuntu.

Re:I just hope they don't get discouraged

[Anonymous Coward]

you beat me to it...

MSDN is awesome for devs. Just spun up 4 vm's with server 2008 today. 700 bucks for all the OS's 1000 bucks comes with visual studio.

MSDN is designed for 'dev and test'. Think it is something like 5 or 10 copies of each OS with keys. You can call them up and get more.

However, for someone who is just messing around at home, even 700 bucks is a steep price to pay.

If I could afford it I would get the vs ultimate msdn. That code rewind thing is pretty freeking cool. However it is not 4000 dollars cool... But I dont have the cash so I stick with the 'free' open source stuff.

Re:I just hope they don't get discouraged

[Anonymous Coward]

Before you embark on anything, consider this:

It sounds like you need the Microsoft Partner Action Pack. Just sign up as a basic partner (no entry requirements) then buy the Action Pack here: https://mspartner.microsoft.com/en/uk/Pages/Membership/action-pack-subscriptions.aspx - you know you want to. It makes sense. You even get lots of free training and discounts to sweeten the deal and get embedded further into the ecosystem.

The moment you start promoting this stuff, people want you to use your new skills to help them. A few years down the line, you've nailed it job-wise thanks to your new skill set and have a deployed SQL 2008 instance for your favourite client which has cost them £32000GBP in licenses per machine (not terrible). They are super-happy as it's saved them a fuck load on Oracle and it requires only one DBA. Then the CIO comes to you and asks about SQL 2012 upgrades so they can use the new failover/replication stuff. You do the research, then realise they fuck you over by changing it from physical CPUs licenses to cores, resulting in your cash efficient 12-core Xeons turning into another order of magnitude of cost: £386,000 per server! You phone your partner rep up they say "use Azure" which is fuck all use if your data volume is in the TiB space, so it's bend over and take it or spend a year rewriting it all (you know because you wrote most of the app in T-SQL because it was promoted as the "best way of doing things").

This is a cautionary tale as we are as above. Not only that the license audit legal hounds are upon us and are making sure they bleed us dry or at least drag us through the courts to make a few notes even though we're compliant. Guilty until proven innocent.

Seriously, just use Debian/Ubuntu (and PostgreSQL) and avoid this shit completely.

Posted anonymously as we'll probably get sued. Stallman was ALWAYS fucking right. Listen to the guy.

Re:I just hope they don't get discouraged

[El_Oscuro]

License cost is not just important for someone messing around at home. It can have a profound impact on large corporations too. There it is not so much the cost of the license itself, but the cost of procuring and managing them. With Server 2008, you have to have install and configure "activation servers". WTF? The amount of time spent managing license keys, activation servers, and other bullshit is time you are not working on something productive. Say what you want about Oracle, one thing the get right is they don't have any activation codes or similar crap, yet the last time I checked they still make boatloads of money.

Should you happen to find a new commercial program you need, expect to wait 6 months for the trolls at procurment to either reject it or simply ignore it. On the other hand, with open source, just download and compile. It also a lot easier to get something new through security, as you can say: "I compiled this from source. I have a few minor custom settings, and all of these, along with the compile scripts are in CM. Much easier (and safer) than trusting a random binary BLOB

Re:I just hope they don't get discouraged

[exomondo]

Paying $700 for an operating system that does essentially nothing out of the box is the height of ridiculousness. It's monopoly power at its worst.

No different to a CPU or graphics card, out of the box they do nothing.

Re:Amazon ads

[pointyhat]

I think you got it wrong: "you should be able to turn it on in the privacy settings". Oh no wait, that's not how it works these days - privacy is opt in!

Re:Amazon ads

[MozeeToby]

Personal information is the currency used to buy a lot of products these days. I've never paid Google a dime, but I've gotten many hundreds, if not thousands of dollars worth of value out of their products and services; in exchange I give them an amount of personal data that they use to present me with ads.

This just in

[SuperMooCow]

Ubuntu users unite to have Unity removed from Ubuntu because of bad usability.

Re:This just in

[Gordonjcp]

What's actually wrong with Unity? Is there something you can point to, instead of just "ZOMG it's new I don't like it?"

Re:This just in

[jedidiah]

The question is entirely irrelevant.

I should be able to use what I was using before. The "new hotness" does not require ripping out what was there before. This is why Unity gets grief. It really has nothing to do with "being different".

Canonical pulled a Microsoft.

Re:This just in

[Desler]

Because Unity is the epitome of cargo cult programming. This is an old comment by Matthew Paul Thomas but it summarizes quite well the usability problems with Unity caused by the cargo cult:

In the April usability test, eight of ten people discovered
the hidden menus. But seven of them discovered the menus by
hovering over the maximized window controls, which in 11.04 were visible all the
time. In 11.10, even those window controls will be hidden by default. So I look forward to seeing whether in 11.10, the fraction of people who learn how to access menus is even smaller, or even slower, or both.

But I don’t think that’s even the primary issue. You write as if learnability (or more specifically, discoverability)
and aesthetics are the only two aspects of usability. They are
important, but so is efficiency.

In the same usability test, whenever one of those seven people needed to use the menus a second time, they didn’t aim directly for the relevant menu. They again moused over the window controls to reveal the menus, and then scooted along to the right. This was, of course, grossly inefficient — especially compared with the speed that a top-of-screen menu bar exists to provide in the first place. In 11.10 the window controls will be hidden too, but the basic efficiency problem will remain: at the moment you’re aiming for the target, you can’t see it.

Every so often, some Ubuntu contributor asks why most of the Unity designers use Mac OS X. The reason, of course, is that those designers are experienced with Photoshop, Flash, Illustrator, and other applications that don’t work (or if they do work in Wine, work much less pleasantly) on Ubuntu. And it is precisely those kinds of applications, with their deep feature sets, that use menus most heavily. Anyone who points to Web browsers or mobile OSes as harbingers of a menu-less world is, I think, misguided about what kinds of things people will still use non-mobile OSes for in ten years. It is a small irony that hiding menus by default makes it even less likely that anything like those applications will ever work well on Ubuntu.

Re:This just in

[Gordonjcp]

So, use it. Oh wait, you can't because Gnome 2 has been dropped. Maybe you could try maintaining that?

There are Gnome 2-like desktop environments available in Ubuntu if you want them - just like when Windows 95 came out, if the new "Start" menu thing was too confusing and new, you could fall back to PROGMAN.EXE and have it work just like Windows 3. Some people even did that, too.

Re:This just in

[lennier]

What's actually wrong with Unity? Is there something you can point to, instead of just "ZOMG it's new I don't like it?"

Ok, here goes. A (possibly the) major problem with Unity - and the entire "app-centric" GUI ecosystem from the iDevice and tablet world which it and Windows 8 are aping - is that its focus on applications comes at the expense of documents. This reverses the trend from the 1980s onwards where GUIs were becoming increasingly about the user manipulating rich documents, and puts us right back in the old world of "your data is hard-coded into applications". But that simply isn't the case. Documents transcend applications; the application is just a means to an end.

Why? Two reasons. One, because applications churn faster than data does. For example: my music is a collection of .MP3 and .OGG files. It's over a decade old, and it's not going anywhere. My music player application, however, could be any of Rhythmbox, Banshee, Songbird, VLC. My photograph collection is a bunch of .JPG files. It's also not going to change. The default "photo manager" application (which I'm not sure there's even a need for) in Ubuntu, however, has switched from F-Spot to Shotwell, and then there's the GNOME Viewer if I just want to view them.

Second, there are multiple actions you might want to take with documents, and those different actions may require different applications. If I have a JPG, I *might* want to view it, or I might want to edit it. In that case I'm going to want to open it in GIMP, not Shotwell or Viewer. There's no way the OS can know in advance how I want to work with my data, so it shouldn't attempt to presume that it knows best.

The primary way this broken "applications first" mindset manifests in Unity is with the dock, and the way it groups windows by application rather than document. For instance, if I have two PDF files open, they're two completely separate documents; I want them to appear as two different icons. But no. Dock shows them as one instance of the PDF Viewer, and only once I click on them does it ask me which one I want. That's not at all what the user requires; it's an objective regression in usability (from the document-centric perspective) from even Windows 95's interface. But it's not a bug, it's a design decision, and it's come from inhaling uncritically the iDevice approach of "the app is everything".

I hope this app-focus is just a passing fad in the industry, because it reverses more than thirty years of user interface progress. It's been good news to app developers, as it assures them a privileged industry position and a revenue stream. But it's not good news to the user who wants the ability to sculpt their own document-centric workflow.

Re:This just in

[LVSlushdat]

The question is entirely irrelevant.

I should be able to use what I was using before. The "new hotness" does not require ripping out what was there before. This is why Unity gets grief. It really has nothing to do with "being different".

Canonical pulled a Microsoft.

If Canonical really believes that Unity is the new "hot thing", it would have been trivial to add a choice during install... New (Unity) or Classic (Gnome2), and let the user-base decide, but nooooooooooo, they know whats best for EVERYONE... I tried Unity for a week, I really did.. With all the new weird shite it does, and stuff that I was used to with Gnome2 that no longer is there/works the same way, I started tearing my hair out by the roots. Since, God Help Me, I still love Ubuntu, I installed Cinnamon, which brought me back to familiar territory... I've also tried Windows 8, and parent is absolutely right.. Talk about different.. Windows 7 vs Windows 8.. Trying to run a tablet OS on a dual screen desktop is enough to drive you batty...

Re:This just in

[lister king of smeg]

it hides programs i don't use everyday in a sea of apps, rather than giving me a simple hierarchical menu that I can get to it in under 5 seconds, any files i have not previously opened are ignored by the search in the hud, files on external media are ignored by the hud file searchs, there that just the first few i could think of in less than two minutes

Re:Amazon ads

[pointyhat]

The argument is definitely not moot. Opt-in vs Opt-out are completely different as there are opportunities for the opt in situation to occur before you get a chance to opt-out. Asking the user up front is the best approach (even Microsoft do this with Windows 8).

I donated...

[osmosys]

twenty bucks to Mint! :-D

Re:I donated...

[i.r.id10t]

And I donate bandwidth to them all - debian, mint, ubuntu, slackware ... any time I see a new version release notice (usually here on /.) I ssh to my hosted server, start up screen, and start torrenting. Depending on when in the month it is (I get 200gb/mo xfer) and what I've used (typically nothing), I'll seed for 25-50gb upload or until upload from my box is close to nothing.

I can't code well enough to donate that, I don't have any extra $ to donate, so this is how I contribute (and how just about anyone can).

Mint Yes -- Ubuntu No

[Penurious Penguin]

Although Mint is ubu-based, they seem to listen to their users, seemingly unlike post-LucidLynx Ubuntu. To me, Mint is what Ubuntu was before it went Authoritarian Bubble Rubbish -- a pretty fantastic, if not amazing distro. Back in Lucid, I'd not have thought twice about clicking the donation link. However, to pay what I think "it's worth" would probably be unreasonable, since a functional, stable distro is nearly invaluable to me. One could easily think that putting a billionaire behind Linux would be a wonderful thing, but I am not so sure. I also wonder if bubble-people are the sorts that would donate; they might find the process too complex and give up. Maybe Ubu should have an app glued by myriad dependencies that activates upon network-connection and solicits the user with a guided bubble-journey to their bank* account. Maybe they could deprecate Bash for a squeak interface, where users can squeak audible commands to execute various applications; "If you'd like to make a donation, please emit a higher, rather than lower-pitched squeak now.", etc.

Yes, I am slightly bitter; because I remember Ubuntu as something almost inconceivably excellent. The idea of having the freedom of Linux along with out-of-the-box functionality seems almost too good to be true. Thankfully there's Mint for that.

What an odd coincedence

[GameboyRMH]

I'd recently decided to switch my laptop to Mint.

Re:Entry for "Canonical owes me $[xxxx]" ?

[Scragglykat]

Dependency hell? You sure you aren't thinking of Redhat/Fedora? I've never had any dependency issues with Ubuntu that I didn't have with Debian, which is to say, I've never run into any... still... if you aren't into the GUI and you don't want to use their daemons or additional features, I can't see why you would pick them over Debian anyway. Oh, that's right. Paid developers which allows for packages to make it into the stable builds sooner so you don't wait 3 years for the version of Apache from 3 years ago to be added to your latest release. I forgot about that.

I hope 90% of the money...

[stox]

goes to Debian, where 90% of the work comes from.

Re:I hope 90% of the money...

[wisnoskij]

The people who do the most work, should get the most money?
Sounds like communist propaganda to me.

Re:I hope 90% of the money...

[Anonymous Coward]

In that case, shouldn't Debian turn 90% of its donations over to upstream projects, you know, where the work is done?

Re:Best Linux Donation?

[afgam28]

I'd probably say RedHat. Unfortunately their desktop isn't quite as nice as Ubuntu's. They do things like run SELinux by default, exclude certain drivers/codecs, and have really ugly fonts!

But they do a solid server distribution, and (unlike Canonical) have a good reputation of pushing their changes back upstream. They employ a lot of developers to work on open source projects such as the kernel, and generally speaking they are a good open source community member.

Mr. Shuttleworth's car needs a new set of wheels

[Mister Liberty]

That's what this is all about.

Re:Entry for "Canonical owes me $[xxxx]" ?

[afgam28]

You remind me of the Comic Book Guy:

Comic Book Guy: Last night's Itchy & Scratchy was, without a doubt, the worst episode ever. Rest assured I was on the Internet within minutes registering my disgust throughout the world.
Bart: Hey, I know it wasn’t great, but what right do you have to complain?
Comic Book Guy: As a loyal viewer, I feel they owe me.
Bart: For what? They’re giving you thousands of hours of entertainment for free. What could they possibly owe you? If anything, you owe them.
Comic Book Guy: Worst episode ever.

Re:ubunutu is for noobs and lamers

[eric_herm]

If you want something supported for a long time, I would say Centos or Debian are the way to go. And if you wish to sustain developpers, you can either donate to Debian with SPI, or pay for a RHEL subscription, and that benefit to Centos, Scientific Linux, or even OEL, who are all clones of RHEL, and pay for jobs of many upstream developers ( http://www.redhat.com/promo/os-community/projects.html ).

Re:Mr. Shuttleworth's car needs a new set of wheel

[agoliveira]

Believe or not, Mark Shuttle worth does not have a car. He bikes to work. When in London he usually either bikes, takes the tube or, in case of something urgent, a taxi.

Yes, I was a big fan

[__aawzag621]

I thought Ubuntu was wonderful under KDE and Gnome both. Would have been pleased to donate, never saw a web page that asked me to do so. Then they shoved Unity down my throat, far before it was ready, and I didn't upgrade for 2 releases. 10.10, I believe, finally broke via upgrades that didn't work (3rd team must have been assigned to that), and I finally had to use Unity on 12.04. I couldn't make the old gnome work for some reason. PITA. I wasted a lot of time and lost a lot of loyalty in that mess. Now they ask for donations. There is something very wrong in their thinking. So I will make a donation for past services, but I am looking for a new distribution.

Re:Yes, I was a big fan

[Penurious Penguin]

..but I am looking for a new distribution.

IMO, Arch, Archbang, or Mint may be worth your consideration. If you were unaware, Mate is a very fine fork of Gnome and is very usable. Mint's Cinnamon is coming along too, and I suspect it will eventually be very nice. I remember being very content with Lucid but dreading 2013 when it would no longer receive support. I nearly kept waiting, but seeing the direction Ubu was taking, I got anxious, made backups and re-formatted for Mint. I tried Cinnamon first, then xfce, and finally settled on Mate. It was a difficult choice between xfce and Mate, but Mate offered a few little things that I'd come to rely on. If you are considering donations, there are probably others which could also use the extra cash. It may seem dick to say, but I'm leaving the Ubu donations to B'naire Rex Shuttlesoft.

If you do try Mint, be sure to consider an upgrade to kernel 3.4.6 or higher -- there have been some nasty bugs which freeze the entire system, requiring hard reboots, frequently.
http://www.upubuntu.com/2012/07/install-linux-kernel-346-on-ubuntu.html

That's the wrong direction

[Wee]

No need to, you can turn it off anyway, in Privacy settings.

Users should have to turn that sort of half-baked, privacy-leaking shit on, not off.

-B

Mozilla should do this

[scdeimos]

If users could donate to Mozilla and direct funding to particular components of Firefox and Thunderbird, perhaps we'd see some of the five-year-old+ bugs get fixed and Thunderbird would get an Exchange Web Services connector for mail/contacts/notes.

Re:Pay for Ubuntu?

[LurkerXXX]

Amen. I'll give to Mint instead. At least they listen to feedback from users.

Re:Pay for Ubuntu?

[collet]

Well I like my limited screen space not wasted with useful things in useful corners.

I wish more software was funded like this

[Liluakip]

Advertisers and venture capitalists pollute people's motivations and in the worst cases lead to user experience being compromised to satisfy other agendas. Kickstarter projects, app.net and Sublime Text (just from my personal experience) seem like excellent steps in the right direction: marketing directly to end users without all the nonsense and corporate financial trickery wedged in between. There are cases where this can't work, of course. I think Wikipedia and Google should be essential public services but in the absence of an effective world government (or indeed particularly effective national ones) it doesn't seem like there's anyone who can take responsibility for them.

Re:Amazon ads

[SolitaryMan]

There is a difference between:

• I don't know there is an option.
• I know there is an option, but I can't find it (given up).

It may be right there, easy to find, but if you are simply unaware of the situation (like with phoning home, for example), then it is still "hidden".

The only acceptable (yet obtrusive) way to handle this is if when you run it for the first time it will pop up a dialog asking you, are you agree to this or that thing and have the option that favors you selected by default. Still, many people won't read the crap (see EULAs), but now nobody can say you were not given a choice.