That you need to do this, is frankly disturbing.
Maybe I am a linux hermit, but you guys really abide this shit? I can't fathom a tech savvy person giving this kind of software a pass anymore. I know, lock in, standards, etc. But damn.
Maybe I am a linux hermit, but you guys really abide this shit? I can't fathom a tech savvy person giving this kind of software a pass anymore. I know, lock in, standards, etc. But damn.
I think what it boils down to is that he's abdicated his technical thinking to Microsoft because he can't keep up with it any more. When Microsoft was at it's 90's peak, he concluded that he could snuggle into their product-bosom, and ride out the rest of his career on his knowledge of Visual Basic. He wasn't necessarily wrong, but it's a decision that he doesn't have the bandwidth to reevaluate now, as his career is centered around managing. So he just ignores all of these kinds of articles. I guess that's one approach.
People at much higher levels in large companies are in much the same boat. They make purchasing decisions based on Microsoft doing no wrong, and give them the capital to ignore feedback from the public sector. And that's why we are where we are.
At least, that's the way I think it works.
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.
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.
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.
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.]
Edit: corrected the company name!
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.
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.
In the enterprise space you used to buy "Software assurance" to make sure you were always licenced to have the latest version.
NOW, with Win10, Software assurance is the reverse. you have to PAY EXTRA to make sure that your win10 version DOESNT get new feature updates. To keep it at certain level. (ie prior to when they started pumping it full of adverts).
To me thats a stand-over tactic... "Nice OS you got there... it'd be a shame if something was to 'Appen to it..."
Our shit-abiding tolerance is higher than you might think.
It's been about 10 years or so since I did any web development. And yesterday we had a thread here about CSS minifying, and one of the CSS files were ~250KB. What the hell kind of abominations are people making that need 250KB of CSS?
Without being judicious, it's easy enough to see happen.
Not to mention a few resource embeds to shave load time (fonts, svg, images, etc).
Reactive native I'm more open minded about, but I'll reserve judgment until I see how well the obey things like themeing.
But I can see how they wouldn't be the preference.
Ubuntu might be the most popular linux distro, but there's so many other options out there. Take a look at https://distrowatch.com/ there's basically a distribution for any type of usecase you might imagine. Hell if you can't find a distribution to suit your needs nothings stopping you from starting your own.
Using 'dogs' and 'poodles' interchangeably subconsciously implies that all/most dogs are poodles.
I think the big difference here is the relative mindshare of Windows in the Windows ecosystem (100%) vs the share of Ubuntu in the Linux ecosystem (popular and dominiant, but not 100%).
A very small portion of the Linux community made the decision to put the launcher ads in, a large chunk of the community made a very loud fuss, and the feature was removed.
Why not? Ubuntu (along with Red Hat & others) is a commercial distribution of Linux, but it's not the only Linux. Users who care about their freedom & privacy don't use Ubuntu, because it includes proprietary drivers & does things like phone home.
Users of distros such as Debian, OTOH, do care about those things, and I think it's very fair for us to note that we find the behaviour of Microsoft recently to be quite remarkably sad.
If I start selling beer with piss in it, does suddenly all beer taste like piss or just the one I'm selling?
Debian's momentum is due to the fact that it's a really stable, really well-thought-out, sysadmin-friendly, production-quality, freedom-respecting, privacy-respecting Linux distro; I don't think that has changed, and I don't think that anything beats them by those metrics.
Ubuntu's momentum is due to the fact that it supports proprietary hardware, is easy to use, and is pretty. You may be right that other distros are better than it there.
Debian & Ubuntu are very different.
It's a very stable economic arrangement /s.
What would be the point for those people to change to Linux if they can't do there what they've bought the product for?
I can see a philosophical opposition to this stuff, but practically it doesn't affect me at all.