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| Ubuntu 12.10 to ship with Amazon advertisements |
| By Thom Holwerda on 2012-09-22 22:07:47 |
| Ubuntu 12.10 will include advertisements for products on Amazon. It will look like this - if you search, product suggestions will pop up. This seems like a rather slippery slope to me, and I certainly wouldn't want this on my desktop, laptop, smartphone, tablet, or anywhere else. On the web - fine, I'm on your site, not mine - but my desktop is mine, and mine alone. Not that it matters - open source, someone will disable them. Biggest concern: does this mean my search queries get sent across the web? |
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| RE[3]: It's just a lens |
| By Gullible Jones on 2012-09-23 04:07:55 |
| FOSS works fine on the desktop for single applications, or IMO even software collections like the GNU userland. What it doesn't work fine with is a huge agglomeration of software produced by different developers with vastly different ideas of what's sensible. |
 - Score: 6 |
| RE[3]: It's just a lens |
| By TM99 on 2012-09-23 04:13:26 |
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No, what the Linux community was impressed with initially was the fact that an African millionaire decided to produce a Debian Linux spin-off that would be available for 2nd and 3rd World countries. Ubuntu, the distro, however, is not Canonical, the corporation. Shuttleworth is independently wealthy and annual revenues for their services still nets them around $30 million. No that is not Apple, but it is hardly bleeding out and struggling to keep the lights on. FOSS and Linux are not the same as 'corporate capitalism' though they are hardly 'communistic' in opposition to it. But you obviously confuse the two numerous times in this post. Most complaints these days about Ubuntu and Canonical are that they do not know how to separate the two either. For example, Ubuntu's insistence on using Unity and now adding by default (i.e., I must opt-out not opt-in) integrated Amazon search are two examples of this inappropriate fusing of two radically different philosophies where both become watered down. Freedom is removed from Ubuntu, and Canonical is still not the African Apple or Microsoft. If they want to be financially more successful, they could learn a thing or two from the market segment leaders like IBM, Red Hat, etc. Red Hat and Fedora keep and maintain this separation. If Fedora wants to be bleeding edge and do something stupid like adding Gnome 3, then they can. If it is a screw-up, someone will fork it, maintain Gnome 2, etc. Red Hat's corporate Linux is very conservative and maintains stability for long-term business customers and thereby provides them a much more stable and growing revenue stream. After all, RHEL versions 4, 5 & 6 ship with Gnome 2.8, 2.16, & 2.28 respectively. Shuttleworth made his millions in the 'dot-com' high as a venture capitalist. He is a 'personality' and not necessarily the best person to run a successful long-term corporate entity in the 'Linux' world. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[2]: What... the... f***... :| |
| By UltraZelda64 on 2012-09-23 04:15:25 |
|
> Hmm,I can see gimp right there, install-able from the software center. Doesn't look removed to me. I knew that one was coming. Here, let me clarify what I meant in a more complete explanation. I admit I was a bit vague on what exactly I meant, and it was too late to update the post: "Remove the GIMP, without providing a decent, suitable alternative in its place on the standard installation disc." Yes, it's in the repositories, always has been. It's a simple "sudo apt-get install gimp" away for anyone who knows how and wants to use the command line. Hell, it's even somewhere in the software center as you mentioned (I would hope so, considering the software center is just a glorified GUI for the package management system, dumbed down for people who don't know Linux). But should a regular user be forced to go out of their way to install, of all things, a bitmap image editor? F-Spot or whatever it is was *not* a suitable replacement. It is an image organizer/library application that wants you to make copies of all your pictures in a another directory just to use it (no thanks, I have a file system and don't want copies of my pictures all over the place), and it offers no real bitmap creation/editing support. And don't try to say that crop, rotate and remove red-eye provide proper, complete image editing functionality. > It's an announcement that they want adopt wayland early and when it's ready. Oh my, what a horrible thing to do. You may have noticed that it hasn't happened yet. Just as they "adopted" Unity when it was "ready"? Note the sarcasm. > You do know that different cultures favors different colors, right? Personally I've always liked the earthy Ubuntu colors. It's a design choice, it doesn't have to suit everyone. Sure beats the billions of boring blue/gray color schemes out there. Hey, if you like the color of dirt, mud and shit, by all means, enjoy yourself. You might just be one of the few people who has less post-install configuration to do. |
| - Score: -1 |
| RE[4]: It's just a lens |
| By Gullible Jones on 2012-09-23 04:20:42 |
|
Yes, because we all want another god damn proprietary operating system. Why the hell not? It would help create some bona fide competition on the desktop market, which IMO Apple and Microsoft badly need, both being effective monopolies in their respective niches. Anyway, the problem with OSes isn't that they have proprietary licenses, it's that they have unfriendly licenses. Take Windows for example... You pay $100+ for a physical medium that's licensed to maybe 3 computers, no exception for VMs, have to buy a new license when installing on a new computer, etc. This is not a user-friendly state of affairs, but MS can afford to keep things this way because they have the market cornered. Having alternative, proprietary desktop OSes available might force them to price and license their OS more competitively. |
| - Score: 6 |
| RE[4]: It's just a lens |
| By UltraZelda64 on 2012-09-23 04:23:18 |
|
> No, what the Linux community was impressed with initially was the fact that an African millionaire decided to produce a Debian Linux spin-off that would be available for 2nd and 3rd World countries. Wow. Well if that's it, then it truly is ironic that Ubuntu is now trying to advertise shit from Amazon to people in those same second- and third-world countries. Including that continent the distribution itself originates from. Edited 2012-09-23 04:27 UTC |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[3]: It's just a lens |
| By Gullible Jones on 2012-09-23 04:25:42 |
| BTW, have you ever tried Solaris for x86? It's proprietary (again) but freeware for personal use. Oracle probably puts a lot of effort into QC for it, and it has several advantages Linux (like being much more secure by default than 90% of distros last I checked). Honestly no idea what it's like on the desktop though, or what sort of hardware support it has. |
| - Score: 1 |
| RE[3]: What... the... f***... :| |
| By Soulbender on 2012-09-23 04:35:08 |
|
> "Remove the GIMP, without providing a decent, suitable alternative in its place on the standard installation disc." Who cares? Why does the default install have to come with a bitmap editor? Most people don't need a bitmap editor and if/when they do it's easily install-able. That's what important. Besides, considering GIMP's godawful UI pretty much ANYTHING is better for the average use case. > Just as they "adopted" Unity when it was "ready"? Note the sarcasm. Unity is their own project, Wayland isn't. Besides, you seem to put an awful lot of importance in something that hasn't even happened. > Hey, if you like the color of dirt, mud and shit, by all means, enjoy yourself Good job insulting everyone, which happen to be a large part of the non-western world, who like different colors. |
| - Score: 5 |
| Ubuntu's future doesn't look too bright to me... |
| By Gullible Jones on 2012-09-23 04:39:33 |
|
So far we've got: - Unity, a pretty GUI that is extremely annoying to use. (Why do you have to click through 3-4 things to get to the CD burner application?) - Unnecessary 3D rubbish on the desktop, plus transparency and blur effects ad nauseum, despite the fact that Linux graphics drivers suck moose. Doing fancy stuff without the framework to support it is a recipe for failure, people. - The apt-xapian-index cron job, which eats up all available CPU cycles for 10 minutes or so once a week so that apt-get can be a tiny bit faster. Sure you can disable it, but what do you think Uncle Jim-Bob's opinion on Ubuntu will be when his desktop goes catatonic? - And now desktop advertising by default. Yeah, that's going to go over well. ... BTW, how does Canonical make money? Selling tech support? |
| - Score: -1 |
| RE[4]: It's just a lens |
| By Soulbender on 2012-09-23 04:40:08 |
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> Freedom is removed from Ubuntu Exactly how does this remove any freedom from Ubuntu? > they could learn a thing or two from the market segment leaders like IBM, Red Hat Ah, so they should create an enterprise product that is partly closed source and relies on Windows? |
| - Score: 5 |
| RE[5]: It's just a lens |
| By TM99 on 2012-09-23 04:44:14 |
|
> > No, what the Linux community was impressed with initially was the fact that an African millionaire decided to produce a Debian Linux spin-off that would be available for 2nd and 3rd World countries. Wow. Well if that's it, then it truly is ironic that Ubuntu is now trying to advertise shit from Amazon to people in those same second- and third-world countries. Including that continent the distribution itself originates from. That was my observation at the time in the professional worlds I am in with those who use Linx, and yes, I definitely agree that it is ironic as hell! Personally, I was never impressed with Shuttlworth nor Ubuntu. I will just use Debian proper. |
| - Score: 2 |
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