[Drumlin]

> Maybe I am a linux hermit, but you guys really abide this shit?

Didn't Ubuntu do something like this with search in the past? These companies love to cream off whatever extra income they can get. Turning operating systems into services, with their increasing reliance on expensive cloud data centers is only going to make the problem worse.

[laumars]

Ubuntu did and got heavily criticised for it by the wider community. So Canonical reversed their decision on opt-out in-OS ads.

For what it's worth, it's easier to switch between Linux distributions than it is to switch from Windows to something else. Ubuntu is only one of literally thousands of desktop Linux's - many of which are forks / reskins of Debian or Ubuntu to begin with, so it was pretty trivial for users to dump Ubuntu in favour of an ad-free Linux. So Canonical didn't really have much choice other than to listen to the complaints.

[Brakenshire]

> For what it's worth, it's easier to switch between Linux distributions than it is to switch from Windows to something else.

That's understating it a bit. You just sudo apt install one package, log out, and select the different DE. It's a 30 second job.

[pessimizer]

There's a huge difference between just switching your desktop and switching your entire distribution, but it's still easy. Just plow under the OS partition with something else.

[e12e]

And this is actually one of the great things about zfs: you can now have a volume manager and filsystem that is fully portable across FreeBSD, (Open)Solaris and Linux. Keep /home on a zfs volume, and you can really mix things up.

The only thing missing is solid cross os encryption - but for those that can live with some metadata being exposed, it looks like encryption is coming [ed: to open zfs].

I suppose one might even share home filsystems with OS X - but running OS X requires Apple hardware (and/or breaking the license and some hacks).

[Ed: and sharing home filsystems across unix-like os' actually works: thanks to things like the Bourne shell and other software being available and using the same storage for preferences etc (typically text files) - Bsd even comes with an emulation layer to run Linux executables.]

[bluejekyll]

Canonical is a for profit company that ships a distribution of Linux. Linux has many very free alternatives. Ubuntu has a very nice user experience, and that's why people choose to use it.

Edit: corrected the company name!

[popinman322]

Sorry to nitpick here, but...

Ubuntu is a linux distribution; Canonical is the company that maintains, serves, ships, and provides support for Ubuntu. I feel like you didn't make that distinction clear in your comment.

[bluejekyll]

You're of course correct, I updated my comment.

[Kerrick]

To nitpick even more, Ubuntu is a GNU/Linux distribution.

[Arizhel]

Yes, Ubuntu had something called the "amazon search lens" which was easily removed with a command-line like "sudo apt-get remove amazon-search-lens". It pissed off a lot of people though, and a bunch simply moved to a competing distro, such as Mint. This was pretty easy since Mint is derived from Ubuntu (but without the UI stuff). Canonical finally relented and removed the offending software.

See, this is why competition is so nice. With Linux, it's fairly easy to jump ship and move to a competing distro at any time. I can do it in under an hour. (It helps keeping your user data on a separate partition from the rest of the OS.) It's really easy when you stay within the same "camp" of distros, so there's little learning curve: the Debian/dpkg distros are somewhat different from the Redhat/Fedora/RPM distros, but within those camps they're extremely similar. Even switching between those camps isn't that hard. One distro pisses you off? No problem, just go download one of its sister distros and install. Try that with Windows. And if you'd rather stick with your distro but make a change, this is comparatively easy since the system is open-source and put together in a transparent way. Like the Amazon search lens above: it wasn't baked deeply into the system in an opaque way, it was a separate dpkg package. It's easy to look at package contents for system components like this, see any dependencies, and uninstall them if you don't like them. You can even take out large parts of the system (like the UI) and replace them with something entirely different, which is exactly what Linux Mint does, using Ubuntu's base packages, omitting Ubuntu's "Unity" DE, and sticking your choice of 4 different desktop environments on top.

[fnordfnordfnord]

They did, and you can make an excuse of it in their case considering what they charge for an OS. Nevertheless, the users were revolted, and Canonical removed the ads.