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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one here who thinks this is not disturbing at all?

If you don't like it, it's not very difficult to turn off. If you find it too difficult to turn off, maybe Ubuntu is not the right operating system for you.

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If this becomes an important money maker for Canonical, you just know that they will find a way to make it hard to turn off. This seems like the first step where they are willfully making the user experience worse rather than better, to fulfill a shortterm end. If this is the only way for Canonical to break even on Ubuntu, that says a lot about the future of desktop Linux in general.

But this isn't just ads. In fact, I doubt it's even primarily ads. I like this functionality a lot, as long as I can turn it off. I like being able to quickly press a key then search Amazon. It's a great new feature for me and I'm happy it's included.

A lot of people are upset, but this isn't like having a banner ad on the desktop. It's a real feature, just with a nice side effect for Canonical.

If it's ever any harder than "apt-get remove --purge" then you'll have a problem worth complaining about. Until then, meh.

"you just know that they will find a way to make it hard to turn off"

What makes you say that?

Classic slippery slope fallacy. Until it's actually hard to turn off, this argument is meaningless.

Privacy concerns aside, in what ways does this actually worsen the user experience?

Being profitable is not a 'shortterm end'.

It's not that difficult to install software either. They could have made it opt-in and saved themselves a bunch of bad press.

I suspect most users would consider this a useful thing rather than an intrusive feature.

Ubuntu's goal has always been Linux for the Masses. Now, if the discussions are accurate, unknowing users will be searching "my_girlfriend_michelles_porn.zip" and see that information passed to Amazon. It's not what most people would want, and in the land of choices, Ubuntu has in minutes made it a lot harder for me to recommend them.

Xubuntu is pretty nice... but I might end up moving to Debian if they start pushing this out.

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