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Comment by 2pointsomone | Hacker News Reader

I have been following the Ubuntu homepage for about 15 years, and it's so interesting how they went from prominently promoting every CTA around downloading the desktop version, to now, where I had to spend 5 minutes trying to find a link on their site to the ubuntu.com/desktop site.

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For me it was ubuntu.com -> Hover on Download -> Click on the green button below Ubuntu Desktop.

Exactly! The only way we ever knew how to use ubuntu.com.

I had to actually click on the "Download" button to make the download pane appear, but it seemed pretty straightforward to me.

There is a large link to "Ubuntu Desktop" at the top left. I'm not sure why this was so hard for the GP. Maybe it could be slightly easier if you didn't have to click on the big Download link in the first place, but it seems to require very low effort as far as I can tell. Maybe he's running on a textmode browser with no Javascript support?

I found something else sad about their site. It slaps me in the face with one of those "select the type of trackers you consent to" popups.

Is this really aligned with Canonical's (and Ubuntu's) philosophy and goals?

> Is this really aligned with Canonical's (and Ubuntu's) philosophy and goals?

The snarky answer and the sincere answer are the same for once: Yes. If you want that, go to Debian.

quickest way to navigate their site is with duckduckgo or google.

This is actually incredible. I can't believe it's this hard to get your hands on their most important product.

I can totally imagine this costing several would-be-users

>on their most important product.

That's the ec2 image over at amazon.

I feel like at this point, Ubuntu Desktop is actually something downloaded more by OEM integrators than by individuals. More and more, the people who want a computer that has good Linux support, can just buy a computer that ships with an OEM Linux install. And that Linux installation is usually Ubuntu!

(Mind you, there are plenty of “retail” installs of Ubuntu — but individuals will often just upgrade Ubuntu to a new release using built-in tooling, rather than downloading a fresh release-image. They only need to visit the site once—the first time they install.)

I think, if you’re visiting ubuntu.com nowadays, you’re most likely to be looking for an Ubuntu Server image.

Hmm, I would have thought that a lot of people 'looking for a server image' would be spinning up a VM from a cloud provider, who probably doesn't yet offer the newest version? Of course, depending on how disposable your server will be, you may not want the newest, I wouldn't generally use any non-LTS versions in production, but maybe that's just me.

> on their most important product.

If Ubuntu depended on random users pointing their browsers to ubuntu.com and then clicking a download link to download and burn an ISO, they'd be long, long gone. There hasn't been any real $$$ in that since, well, forever?

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