> It sounds like you did some great research on this, and you're right. Customers are no longer able to remove the album on their own. You will need to reach out to Apple Support directly to have the album removed.
As an added kicker, I stressed over it for a couple of weeks first, worried about whether I was being homophobic or not.
My daughter is vegetarian. We always cook her vegetarian food for dinner. Her little brother likes to bug her about it. We tell him not to, because giving people a hard time about their preferences is rude and annoying. But we also make sure that the vegetarian can't get cranky when everybody else is eating real bacon and she's eating vegetarian bacon. That'd be just as rude and annoying. It's called "tolerance", kids. I don't understand how we've entered into this world where we aren't all supposed to try to tolerate (let alone encourage and support) one another, but that tolerance only goes in one direction. That seems very odd to me.
If you would still feel uncomfortable if it were a photo of man and a woman doing the same thing on your screen in your open office at work, then no. I personally wouldn't want either in my work environment. I have a strong separation of my personal life and work. It's a simple test really, just imagine the reverse and if you feel the same way about a naked man and woman on your desktop at work, then no, you aren't being a homophobe.
Though the U2 album has become such a meme, I'm sure people would have a good laugh at Apple over it.
They've moved it back to start in 8.1, but by that point I've already switched to elementary OS (beta of 0.2 Luna), and that's (mostly) where I've stayed for the past 10 years (there were a couple of attempts of switching to GNOME, they've all failed).
It's ironic that a "rolling release" OS is often more stable than a "mainstream" OS like Ubuntu. That's just been my experience over the past few years though, and I feel that it's important to help more devs realize that!
I'm also seriously considering Fedora Silverblue once I get more of a feel for how it works under the covers.
My disk encryption is a little complicated so I'm happy that my rolling release means I only have to re-install when I swap boxes. That was my biggest issue with Ubuntu -- your were SOL when EOL :P
Some of the more drastic changes aren't adopted this way, eg: filesystem defaults
You can Google for "microsoft (buy|acquire) canonical" and find points on why it's very likely.
On other systems, some things are literally (today) impossible to change, unless you have access to the source code, which you as a normal person don't.
You don't have to use Unity, and thank god for that.
I'm not sure how good or bad Bing, Edge etc are as I only use them occasionally, but it does seem concerning that Microsoft has changed these defaults during an update. Is this even legal, post anti trust etc?