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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

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pjmlp·

> I even read that windows embeds ads. In the OS. How is this remotely acceptable?

The same way FOSS projects, and Linux distros happen to do, because they need the money.

https://github.com/standard/standard/issues/1381

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fw...

https://linuxiac.com/ubuntu-once-again-angered-users-by-plac...

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This is not an apples to apples comparison. A single line in my cli letting me know one of my Rails project dependencies is requesting funding is _far_ less intrusive than Windows throwing popup notifications at me about some game they want me to play even though I requested to stop showing me that ad.

FOSS needs money, yes, but it also respects the user and can in no reasonable way be compared to Microsoft's abuse of power without some serious cognitive dissonance.

Only the form changes, the goal is the same.

When FOSS does ads, respects the user, when big corp does ads, exploits the user.

I was referring to Microsoft selling ad space on your computer. Not them using it themselves. In this regard, it's different from what Canonical did.

I'm talking about choices that disrupt user productivity on their computers. Not choices that might annoy users who read each and every line in a 40 lines CLI output.

I don't see a difference, does Canonical themselves write the code for the software they do ads for?

Some people consider being annoyed every couple of 40 lines CLI output disruptive for their work.

All I can say is that I haven't seen a single AD in the last 15 years or so of using many different linux distros while as soon as I've booted any windows 10 or 11 machine, ADs were present everywhere and constantly reminded me that I'm the product.

So those links didn't happen.

avoid Ubuntu and microsoft products (like windows or npm) and you should be fine

Like Github, VSCode and Typescript?

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