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Comment by fracus | Hacker News Reader

Windows is losing the market. People don't care about programs anymore, everything the common person needs is online. Gamers want to game, and browse, and use discord. For non gamers, Ubuntu covers everything with no threat of viruses or getting cluttered with ads.

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Achem, Ubuntu had ads before, I am not sure if this is still the case, but I would not be surprised.

Why the down-vote? Do I need to flood HN with links? It actually had ads. Go ahead and search for it (or ask me), there were ads in more than one places. It even had ads in its motd (and gnome notifications, and somewhere else I forgot)... I do not care if it is your favorite Linux distribution, it ACTUALLY had ads (and might still do) in more than one places.

So "not getting cluttered with ads" is not so certain. Only if they got rid of all ads, but the future is still not certain with regarding to it, as they have done it before without blinking an eye.

See some links https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44079458 for Amazon ads.

Also https://askubuntu.com/questions/1083504/how-to-disable-the-a... for bit.ly links in motd.

If you need more, I am willing to provide.

There “ads” and then there’s “ADS”. Ubuntu might show a bit of text in the ssh motd promoting their own services, but it’s very unobtrusive compared to the ads on other platforms.

It was not just their own services, mate. It showed Amazon ads, too.

https://www.thefastcode.com/en-idr/article/how-to-disable-th... (How To Disable the Amazon Search Ads in Ubuntu's Unity Dash)

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/10asnf/ubuntu_will_n...

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/10hmmb/ubuntu_privac...

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/10/privacy-ubuntu-1210-am...

So yeah, no. To all the down-voters, they were actual ads, and they actually were in Ubuntu. Sorry.

Ah I forgot about that Amazon ad since it was over 10 years ago.

To be fair this was 10 years ago and they have reversed course for a long time. Windows has ads now.

They may have reversed it, but they put it there in the first place. Who is to say they will not do it again? Do you know of any other distributions that have done the same?

And yeah, Windows is awful, too.

Microsoft might decide, at any point, to take all of the ads out of windows, too. Is my comment correct? Technically, yes. Is it relevant? No.

Sure, but back when Ubuntu had ads, you could have said the same about Ubuntu.

My point is that the statement that Ubuntu is without ads is not accurate. They already put ads into Ubuntu, and if currently there are no ads, there might be in the future, because now we know that they do not have an issue doing so.

I get your point, it’s just not relevant

10 years is an eternity in tech-related management.

Genuinely, are the folks who advocated and pushed for the Amazon tie-in even still working for Canonical?

True, but Canonical has been a source of issues for a while (as a general rule, I recommend people avoid anything developed/driven by them). I don't see any of the other commercial linux vendors (even Oracle) being that dumb, and the more community-based distros tend to ensure that any kind of tracking is removed, so if you avoid the problematic vendor, you don't have that issue ;)

Agreed. Canonical pushing Snap is another issue...

> If you need more, I am willing to provide.

What OS do you use?

I use Void Linux. Before that I used Arch Linux, but then I had to install a Linux distribution on my new hard drive and I tried Void Linux. I am still using it. I would gladly switch back to Arch Linux though, I had no issues with it.

Ubuntu community will not accept ads like in windows, we will leave and go back to debian or pop-os or even jump ship and go to open suse. Canonical knows this, they learned, unlike Microsoft. Canonical has given back a LOT to open source and I am a pragmatist. We're not unforgiving purists. Corporations make mistakes, they're run by humans. With windows the war has never stopped and they are only adding more and more ads in a "beatings will continue until morale improves" fashion

Let's not hold Canonical up as some kind of paragons of open source. While yes, they're not as bad as Microsoft (which frankly isn't a high bar to clear), and it seems likely that at the beginning they were enthusiastic supporters, the source code for many of their key services is not open source (unlike e.g. Red Hat), and they have made numerous bad choices over the years (of which the ads were just one example). See the ongoing LXD debacle (https://lwn.net/Articles/940684/) for a recent example.

Back in the late 2000s/early 2010s, Canonical/Ubuntu did good work fixing up lingering issues (e.g. their 100 papercuts program), but for whatever reason (maybe the people left) that was replaced by an era where have they tried to produce alternatives to what everyone else was using, and failing badly. Maybe if they went back to their origins then things might improve, but I suspect they've lost that culture, and they've become the linux distro most matching the trajectory of Google.

Windows have definitely lost me. I grew up on Windows (and DOS...) and while there was always loud criticism pointed at Microsoft, personally I loved everything about Windows from 98 to windows 7. I even liked Windows ME (it's really cool, I swear, and it introduced Movie Maker!) and Vista (best Aero theme to date probably) and obviously XP and 7 as the big winners.

But with 10 and 11 Windows became a massive adware, user experience plummeted, and the OS constantly gets in my way.

The only good thing about Windows in 2025 is wsl. So what does that say?

I tried daily driving Mint and I was instantly filled with nostalgia and appreciation for how the OS really tries to help me do whatever I need, gets out of the way, doesn't ask for anything or makes product "suggestions". It's so smooth and simple compared to Windows right now.

Of course it helps that by now I have more than enough Linux experience, but I would still recommend Mint over Windows to most people.

What are these Windows ads everybody talks about? I'm a daily Windows user but haven't seen any besides the prompts for making bing the default.

To be transparent, I use Windows Pro and am a Microsoft 365 subscriber for my business. Is this why I don't see ads?

Try the start menu. I never use it but they’re all over the place.

It's because you're using Windows Pro.

If you were to make a newcomer trying to break out of Windows ecosystems use Ubuntu, he'll be more put off and probably left with a bad taste for Linux in general. There is a reason distro recommendations nowadays mostly converge on Mint or Fedora, but never Ubuntu. Ubuntu is worse than even Windows 11, and that's saying something because the bar is practically underground at this point.

Chromebooks were there over a decade ago.

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