[2Gkashmiri]

Give these guys a break. If I'm being honest, why the hell are you surfing internet without ubo?

I guess you said mobile so its most likely chrome so guess what? Firefox mobile has ubo and heck even Firefox focus has decent ad blocker. Even on iOS you have some content blockers so you really don't have any reason to use chrome on phones.

If they are making money regardless of my using ubo, that's good for them.

[gabereiser]

Sure, blame the user… This is why we have distros with ads like the OP. It’s our fault for seeing the propaganda you shove down our throats. Give me a break.

[sheepscreek]

There’s no such thing as a free beer. Someone is paying for it. As long as it’s not some kind of spyware, I’ll take the ads and donation prompts.

If we’re discussing annoyance, Wikipedia’s campaigns are a great deal more annoying (but it works).

[SahAssar]

> There’s no such thing as a free beer.

Except there is. Many linux distros are exactly free as in beer besides being free as in speech.

[Dalewyn]

A better analogy might be there's no such thing as a free lunch.

All those distros you mention either have commercial support (eg: Red Hat, Ubuntu) or substantial recurring donations. Someone somewhere is paying even if you specifically aren't.

[SahAssar]

Many foundational OSS projects use work and infra from universities. Many also use work and infra from companies that derive value from them. Partially I pay for it by buying things that those companies provide, partially I pay for it via taxes.

But for all people (inside or outside of the market) there is clearly a free beer (speech included) that you can use for personal or commercial use.

> Someone somewhere is paying even if you specifically aren't.

Someone is paying, but it seems like it is more towards "paying for the library" than it is "paying for a villa".

And in some cases there really isn't someone paying, there is just a person interested in the problem. That is surprisingly common in foundational OSS tech.

[uwagar]

im yet to pay a dime for mx linux and its freaking fast and awesome.

[lockhouse]

Cool, but as has been already mentioned in this thread someone is footing the bill. Even if the developers are fine with donating their time to develop and maintain it for free it still costs very real money to run servers.

[scrps]

I'd suggest perhaps donating if it is awesome.

If you can't donate there are lots of ways to help: add a feature, host a pkg repo mirror, clean up docs, fix bugs, add/manage a package, donate older hardware for compat testing, help out with community support, github issues. Telling people it is awesome also helps but maybe a more detailed why would go a bit further to promote it.

Would be more helpful though if corp OSS users who have their entire operations underpinned by financially undersupported OSS projects stepped up to help.

[matheusmoreira]

I understand what you mean but it's just the world we live in. These surveillance capitalism and attention economy corporations are actively hostile to us and there's no proper legal solution in sight. Therefore we must actively take measures to defend ourselves against their exploitation. Software like uBlock Origin is digital self-defense.

[seedie]

Yes, using an adblocker would be a way for me to not see ads.

But I'm not using one because I usually don't mind seeing ads as it's the main income for most sites.

In this case the ad to content ratio is just too much for my taste. Too many ads and not enough distinction between ads and content.

BTW I tried to add more constructive criticism in another reply https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36653500 as the parent is flagged dead by now it might not be easily visible

[still_grokking]

> But I'm not using one because I usually don't mind seeing ads

The ads aren't the problem.

The problem is the spy industry behind.

Surfing without content blocker is like selling your soul and your first born to the devil, to get nothing in return.