Ubuntu pre-installed and in retail worldwide | Hacker News Reader

Ubuntu pre-installed and in retail worldwide

blog.canonical.com

131 pointsdevx102 comments

Several retail outlets in India sell Dell laptops pre-installed with Ubuntu. It is considered equivalent to DOS, in that, choosing an Ubuntu laptop will save you a few thousand rupees compared to the same laptop with Windows (also helps that most such configurations also omit the almost-ubiquitous and mostly un-neccessary NVIDIA graphic cards). Many customers prefer this because they have easy access to pirated Windows copies. Though due to this, several of them get introduced to Ubuntu, and many continue using it. It especially helps having someone you know who is a Linux user and can help with any gotchas. I've helped several friends and cousins who got Ubuntu with their laptops.

For me though, having a pre-installed Ubuntu is a great way to ensure all the parts of the laptop are working properly.

Sounds a good idea. Is it 12.04 they come with?

Yes. At the least,all the ones I've seen come with 12.04.

Excellent choice again, application updates until 2015 and security updates until 2017, so possibly the life of the laptop.

Do these cheap Ubuntu laptops have a Windows key on the keyboard?

Yes, they do. These laptops are not different from their Windows counter-parts. They were manufactured/assembled with Windows as the target OS, but in a country like India, where financial feasibility is a major factor, providing options with free OS (thus reducing the Windows tax) helps. It was Free DOS for several years, now it's Ubuntu. I think this is one such example, where GNU/Linux being 'free as in free beer', really matters.

If only Microsoft understood how undervalued the Rupee is, and made licensed versions of Windows cheaper. The starter edition is just a disgrace.

Site is down for me. ("Database error - Error establishing a database connection") Google cache:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:hTbf6w3...

It was running Wordpress on Ubuntu. I wonder why Mark isn't using one of Cloudflare, Varnish or even a simple caching plugin.

"High-availability and scalability are exciting in general but there are certain problems that experts see over and over again." - that was the first line in Canonical's highscalability.com advertorial a couple of weeks ago :-)

To be fair, it's a general truism in tech that the cobbler's children never have shoes.

Or it is simply just that WordPress is expected to work like light-weight static sites.

That assumption would have been proven wrong ... lots, and lots of times. That's why there are so many great tools (cloudflare, plugins, ...) to take care of problems like that.

Site Optimization 101 :P

Was that don't use Wordpress or install a cache?

The latter, I assume. Wordpress provides a lot of value that Jekyll or another site generator doesn't, but you do need a cache.

Because it isn't Mark. It's Canonical...

Amazing, in the 13 hours since this link has been posted, the site is still down.

The cache is also down

It's UP

I still can't get Ubuntu 13.04 to connect reliably via wireless, and while there are posts on forums nearly everywhere I look, there appear to be no definitive answers, or concrete procedures. It's a wide-spread problem, with no clear solution.

I use Ubuntu by choice, but I'm getting tired of doing so much sys admin, and having to learn so much that is necessary just to make stuff work, instead of it letting me just work.

It's a hard problem - I know that - and it's getting better, but it still makes it hard to convince people that Linux is a viable choice when all they want to do is get stuff done.

For those who don't like Ubuntu for whatever reason, Linux never locks you in and being non-commercial, it does not kill competition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_distributions

The doesn't solve my problem. If I had Windows on the machine then I'm pretty sure the wireless would "just work." If I bought a Mac then I'm pretty sure the wireless would "just work."

Having installed Ubuntu, or any other Linux distro, I'm pretty sure the chances of the wireless working are south of 70%, probably closer to 20% or less.

Don't get me wrong, I install and use Linux my choice. I'm getting to the point now where I wonder if I'd be better getting Windows or a Mac, and then bringing it up to the level I need, rather than getting Linux, and flailing about trying to get stuff working.

The thing is, you buy a mac with preinstalled OS X, and you buy a PC with preinstalled Windows so it just works, because someone else already tested it so it works. If you would buy a PC with preinstalled Linux it would most probably also just work.

Yes, and one of my earlier machines "just worked" and no doubt that was in part because it has Linux pre-installed.

And what you say is one of the main reasons that being able to buy a machine with Linux pre-installed is such a big deal, and potentially a milestone. It's a minor miracle that Linux is getting the market penetration it does given the near total lack of pre-installed machines.

But it's chicken and egg. Here I am being driven to use Windows when I need wireless connectivity because I can't get the Ubuntu wireless system to work. It's at the point where I browse on the Windows machine, and putty into an Ubuntu machine to do my real work - not a good solution long term. I need to get the wireless working.

But where do I start? I've already spent 2 hours searching around, reading forum postings, reading blogs, trying to find out what's going on, and it's clear that I need to learn a lot more before I can start to understand the problems. Quite simply, it's not a cost-effective option, because I don't want to become a Linux internals expert. With the money I could make during the time I spend sorting this out I could easily just have bought a Mac. Which is a shame.

In a sense this is not a complaint - this is a fleshing out of the current situation with respect to installing Linux on a laptop. It would be nice to play a small part in helping to get it sorted.

The point is, with that money you could have bought a PC with preinstalled Linux on it too ;)

No store anywhere near me has a PC with Linux pre-installed. I don't know how I would go about finding one in which I would have any confidence at all. Without a local store, how would I get potential problems sorted? Without a local store, any problems would land me in the same situation I'm in now.

See the dilemma?

For example, I'm on an Ubuntu machine now, and I've recently tried to upgrade it, but apparently it's too far out of date. I've tried to install some software, but it can't find the necessary site that has the package. So now what? I have nowhere to go apart from the internet, and suddenly I am once again having to learn stuff that I really don't want to have to know.

Again, this isn't a complaint, it's an attempt to help define and clarify the problems faced in getting Ubuntu (and other distros) more widely adopted, something I would love to see.

https://zareason.com/shop/Laptops/

I have a two year old Gazelle Professional from System76. Everything worked out of the box, and in the one case I had an issue (related to reinstalling the OS from a thumb drive), the System76 tech support was absolutely fantastic. Got a direct line to someone who knew all about Linux internals and was able to fix my problem before I could finish articulating it. And for less than the price of a Macbook Pro, I got an i7 processor, two hard drives (Ubuntu preinstalled on a 128GB SSD + a 500GB HD for storage), a beautiful 1080p matte screen, a nice graphics card, and 16GB of RAM. Like I said, this was two years ago and it's still better than most laptops you can get in the price range. The only downside is that the thing is like 6 pounds and sucks up power, but as desktop replacements go I think it would be hard to find better. So the options are there, just not in retail stores yet.

Unfortunately, they seem to have cut the price and removed the discrete graphics card option from the current Gazelle Professional. I guess that makes sense given the state of Linux gaming, but being able to run CUDA on a $1200 laptop was pretty awesome :(

When I bought a System76 computer around the same time-- the low end model for my wife and kids--Ubuntu crashed during setup and never recovered. Fortunately I am savvy enough to be able to do a fresh install. Fortunately, everything did work "out of the box" when I did a fresh install. But average computer user... that just doesn't work.

I understand that frustration, and in the past I considered going back to windows. The thing is, for me at least, when I have a problem on my linux box there is a vast community that seems eager to help. Usually someone else has had my problem and already outlined the fix. When I have problems with drivers on a windows machine the answer is almost always re-install windows. For me that is less then ideal.

When you say "linux" are you referring to the latest Ubuntu release or the /. & HN unpragmatic suggestions to use other distros out of some sort of nerd's protest? I'd be curious if you popped in a Ubuntu live cd or flash drive using 13.10 if your wireless would work.

Personally for me, Ubuntu is used for desktops and servers (one of few options if you want optional paid support, and Ubuntu is slick). Apple for new hardware/laptops, with the introduction of Windows8 I don't see any problem with that. Nothing wrong with Apple or OSX, top notch quality, can't be beat at this point. I would still put a copy of Windows7 on a machine used primarily for gaming though (nothing really wrong with Win7 either, IMO best GUI interface conceived).

I haven't found that to be the case. We build machines, reinstall OSes, upgrade OSes; by and large wireless 'just works' in these cases with Windows. The pre-install is not a special case here.

huh, I've been using Ubuntu, Gentoo and Arch and I never have had any problems. You usually just have to ensure your wireless card has a linux driver. It was like $30 for me to just buy a wireless card that was supported. If you think about it.. Windows = $200, wireless card = $30, clearly the wireless card is cheaper.

I even went and installed it on my girlfriends laptop and it works fine.

I'm pleased you didn't have a problem. In my case, the laptop has been supplied by my institution, so I didn't have the luxury of doing the research on which card it has, and whether there is a Linux driver for it.

Your response is a common one. To me it sounds like you've just said: "Well, if you'd done something different then you wouldn't have problems." That may be true, but it's unhelpful for me.

Im guessing you have a Broadcom chip (it's very common and usually doesn't support linux), I think Ubuntu/the Linux community needs to focus on that. If the wireless hurdle can be overcome Linux would be much more common.

When I installed arch for my sister, the laptop had a broadcom chip. It kind of worked, but with very low signal strength. But the AUR had a package that fixed it, now it works perfectly...

Generally, out-of-the-box Linux driver support is more complete that Windows. Printers, network cards, and other devices that require driver downloads to run on Windows just work on Linux.

You said your machine is brand new -- is there a 802.11ac draft chip in it by any chance?

F/OSS drivers tend to lag behind, in my experience; for "brand new" machines running x86 I've always found myself just using ndiswrapper with the Windows drivers.

I think there are a variety of factors behind this, such as 802.11ac not yet being standardized, chips designed to have firmware loaded from the host machine (so that it can be updated later if the standard changed), and the FCC/CRTC/regulatory bodies in each region of the world (preventing you from having pure F/OSS drivers if said drivers could be modified to allow the hardware to work outside of the e.g. frequencies legally allowed in your region).

The specific chip set question has been mentioned elsewhere. How can I find out what chip set I have?

On Ubuntu:

    sudo lshw

In general, usually one of:

    sudo lspci
    sudo lsusb

Although you will usually want to look up the raw PCI/USB IDs rather than rely on the strings provided by your operating system.

Note that this only works if your system actually can find the PCI/USB IDs for your hardware in its database (adding entries to the list is easier than actually writing drivers for devices, so the probability of this working is relatively high but not 100%). If your hardware is completely unrecognized though, this won't work.

Of course, this may not tell you the exact chipset -- usually, for that, you'll have to look at the chip itself and read the markings off of it. You probably don't want to pull your laptop apart to find that out, but if it's a popular laptop, you can often find out what other people have found inside by looking on sites like iFixit.

Actually, that's not true. Wireless on Windows 8--depending on machine configuration--can be abysmal. My wife and I both own high-end HP machines, and the wireless chips in them haven't been worth shit. Apparently an update coming as part of Windows 8.1 will remedy a lot of the wireless issues people have been having, but really? Even a big corporation for whom this stuff is their bread-and-butter can't get it right. Hopefully 8.1 does resolve our issues: constant disconnects--in spite of our Android tablets and phones continuing to stay connected and enjoy solid unflagging bandwidth, and having to disable and then re-enable the chip to get it to see the wireless network again and reconnect. That said, I'm not holding my breath. In my experience, I'd say Linux has recently become better than Windows in a lot of ways, and Mac OS is even better. On the other hand, with Mac OS you get applications which crash all the time (even if the OS doesn't). So pick your poison...

Having been a tech support agent for a number of windows releases I can assure you that is definitely not the case.

Company I work for puts Windows XP on laptops designed for Windows Vista and Windows 7.

If you think Linux has issues, try using these laptops. Lots of issues with getting out of standby, stability, using external monitors, etc.

Fortunately we're now moving to Windows 7 so at least using a combination that is supposed to work together.

Do you have a bug number?

Can you detail the other issues you are having? I am interested in where Ubuntu causes you more sys admin problems and not less. Our goal is to make the easiest to use, best looking system possible.

No, I don't have a bug number. Yes, I would be very happy to have this fixed. The question is - how much time and effort will it cost me?

Shall we go through the process of getting this sorted, and I will document carefully the resources I expend on it? Can we take this to email and get it fixed? It's a brand new machine, and I'd love to have it working properly, so any help is gratefully accepted, and I'm happy to play my part in getting it sorted.

Wifi issues have been due to kernel/driver problems in the past and have been seen in each of the major distros (depending on the sequence with which a given kernel and driver appear in the distribution).

Logging your issues as a bug and then getting the other people in the forums to join the bug would help people cross reference the issue.

Does anyone else remember the WiFi power management kernel panic bug back in 12.04 development? Got squashed well before release.

  > Logging your issues as a bug and then getting
  > the other people in the forums to join the bug
  > would help people cross reference the issue.

So step-by-step, how and where do I do that?

Does this help? https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs

Btw, reporting bugs is contributing to open-source. It's a way of giving back, for getting the resulting product of billions of man hours (and woman hours) of work, for free.

It might - I've skimmed it, and I think I can find everything I need in there. Thank you.

I fully recognize that me spending time on a bug report is a way of contributing to open-source. I have no problems with that, and I look forward, in some sense, to doing so. My comments are, as I say elsewhere, trying to help as well, to try to help make the system better by recognizing that it is currently optimized for people who already know a lot, and are willing to spend a lot of time trying to work out how to do stuff.

Most of the world isn't like that, so maybe something can be done to help make Ubuntu fit the world better.

When I get time I'll move over to the laptop and get started. I'll also log my time, and see what actually happens in the long run.

Many thanks for your response.

Last time I checked man-hours does not refer to the male gender...

Awesome :)

Easiest way to start is file a bug. There are a few ways to do that, but in this case one of the following two are great.

1. $ ubuntu-bug network-manager

This will gather information about your card and any crashes related to networking etc, send it to LP (Launchpad) and star the bug filing process.

2. Go to https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/network-manager/+b... where you can see if any bugs match what is happening to you. You can then say 'yes, this also effects me' by clicking near the top of the bug. If you don't see a bug that is right for you, you can file a new bug via 'report a bug' on the right hand side near the top of the screen.

Both ways will require an LP account (sorry!), but it just takes seconds to create.

If you just do one of those two (and give me the bug number), we can start taking a look. Obviously we'd love for people who have the time to test potential fixes, though we know this just isn't a realistic possibility in most cases. If, however, you do have the time and are so inclined, that is a great way to also help us figure out what is wrong and how to fix it.

Either way, having a Bug # is great and where we should start. Also, if you have a bug # and are still posting in those forums, having people 'me too' the bug raises awareness of the issue for us in Launchpad, meaning, the more people the bug effects, the hotter the bug and the higher it will be on our (or in this case, my) priority list. In this case, though, if you have a bug #, I'll add it to my list directly ;)

Thanks Jason. Once I finish my current tasks and can reconnect my laptop via a wire I'll do that. See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6504268

I'll get on it ASAP, but it's Sunday evening here, and I have a few other commitments looming. But I will do it, and thanks again.

It seems like every Ubuntu release has some serious hardware regressions of one type or another.. most can be worked around fairly easily, but others not so much. I went from Ubuntu back to Windows (win7) because of a critical regression with Intel graphics (specifically went non-amd/nvidia for the better support).

Since then Its been on servers and in VMs only. Yesterday the drive on my htpc took a dump, so I put Ubuntu 13.04 on, there were three issues.. 1. getting the audio working through hdmi (alsa regression bug, manual .deb download), 2. getting the fglrx legacy drivers going (amd eol'd series, ppa setup) , and 3. getting the media center remote working (remove/re-setup lirc).

None of these were big issues, but between the three, most novices would have given up. That's just a small case, in a mostly working setup (post-install).

I really want Linux to have a better foothold on the desktop, and don't like Windows 8's UI at all on a desktop (it's actually pretty nice for phone/tablet but prefer Android)... in any case it still isn't quite there, even on 5yo hardware.

Just get a Macbook Pro. You get all the benefits of UNIX and you get a slick easy to use UI.

mac mini too

I was recently trying to compile a list of laptops guaranteed to be free from UEFI Secure Boot (mainly because I've have a friend who bought a second-hand laptop with Win8(I think), with plans to install Debian, but then after about a week struggling, he decided it was next to impossible to install).

Anyway, instead of compiling that list I just decided that in future I'd only buy (or recommend to friends) Chromebooks, machines from System76, or MacAirs/MacPros. Maybe now I should add few HPs/Dells to my whitelist.

Are there PCs for which it is impossible to turn Secure Boot off?

The only thing I found difficult with Win 8 and UEFI is to install Linux and retain Windows for dual-booting. After turning off Secure Boot, installing Ubuntu was trouble-free.

Just to add a Point about - System76 provides the best ubuntu based laptops which is totally customizable.. If any System76 people are reading this - "Add Keyboard Backlight - People will rush to buy the laptop"

It is not easy, but should be possible. Your best friend will be boot repair: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair

After a very long sequence of strange incantations, my laptop was fully ok.

Asus sells laptops with GNU/Linux over Amazon in Germany.

In my country, the first thing that many people do after buying a laptop with Ubuntu pre-installed is formatting the drive and install a pirated Windows copy.

That's one of the most sadly ironic things I've ever read.

Funny thing is my blog handled HN front page traffic without hiccup and I'm not developing a server distro or cloud orchestration tool.

For those who don't really need a Mac (no last minute Adobe pixel/vector pushing front-end work nor Mac/iOS dev works needed) where can one find reliable info on 100% Ubuntu/general GNU/Linux distros compatibility?

In short where can I find info about awesome notebooks with 100% Ubuntu compatibility?

Best course of action is to find a notebook without dual video cards (optimus), and go from there.

Find something you like, Google if someone has posted information about the laptop and go from there.

Ubuntu on laptops now adays has pretty damn good compatibility if it's not brand new - but the kernel quickly fixes that if you use a kernel mainline version.

Agreed with the dual video cards - my friend has trouble on his laptop, and I am pretty sure that's what causing it. I've been very happy with my HD4000 grapics card. It handles the desktop environment very well, is low power, and has excellent open source drivers. It's probably not amazing for gaming, but I didn't buy it for that.

I had so many problems with this on my T400 running Ubuntu 12.04. I had roughly half the battery life compared to when it was running Windows because there was no way to disable/enable the discrete and integrated cards. That was so frustrating.

I'm not sure this meets all your criteria, but I'm glad Dell is doing it:

http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/xps-13-linux/pd

Here's a list from Lenovo: http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/detail.page?LegacyDocID=MIGR...

Has a bunch of their current and past systems, with which distributions it has been certified on.

http://blog.canonical.com is working , possibly coming from cache, but blog article is getting 403, bad cache config or facing cache dogpile effect due to the traffic

Forbidden You don't have permission to access /2013/10/01/ubuntu-pre-installed-and-in-retail-worldwide/ on this server.

I'm actually surprised this hasn't happened in US more. There has to be more to that story than just retailers not wanting Ubuntu on laptops, when they could save their customers at least $100 on the machines. It's also strange that in many other countries retailers would still sell you machines with FreeDOS (to save customers money), but not with Ubuntu or other Linux distros, since FreeDOS is all but useless.

My guess is Microsoft is coercing both OEM's and retailers somehow, and if they really have to sell the machines without Windows, then they want them to at least sell them without a real OS on them, that their customers might actually begin to use as it is.

> My guess is Microsoft is coercing both OEM's and retailers somehow

Talk to any of the market insiders, that's exactly what has been happening for decades now.

And it actually has been "improved" from back than as well. If I remember correctly, Microsoft used to prohibit OEM having lines of computers other than Windows to qualify as OEM.

I think it might be a support thing. They don't want people to return the computer because they couldn't figure out how to do simple task X with the OS on the computer, or because an update broke the proprietary drivers required for some hardware.

Retailers don't have the resources to fix these problems, or to help fixing them. They don't have to if the customer installed their OS of choice themselves.

There's microsoft's pressure on one hand, and the preinstalled crap (for which vendors pay retailers) which moves most of the direct cost away from both retailers and users.

If you buy a laptop from the Microsoft store, you can pay a little more for "signature" which is ... Crap free windows. Directly from Microsoft. For an additional payment. I kid you not.

I think that's standard on all Microsoft store laptops, and from what I've seen, they are constantly on sale, much cheaper than Frys, etc.

When I bought my Lenovo 3 years ago, it was $80 extra. I didn't even check what it was - I was going to run Linux anyway. When the box arrived with he sticker "with signature" I almost called to complain that I asked for nothing extra. But I first checked, and saw that thy didn't charge me for it. And also that it was removal of crapware, rather than something additional.

I think your info is a bit out of date-did brick and mortar MS stores even exist then? Seriously, I don't like MS that much, but I wish people would get their facts straight.

Perhaps it is out of date; they did try to charge me $80 to remove crap in March 2011 (so, 2.5 years ago). It was from the online store - but I believe the brick and mortar stores already existed.

OEM gets money from crapware preinstalled on Windows. Also OEM Windows license costs peanuts, so computer without Windows can be actually more expensive.

So the last hurdle to Linux adoption is crapware.

Or some other way for the hardware vendor to make more money on a Linux install than a Windows install.

When the original Eee came out (and started the concept of netbooks) it was pre-installed with Linux. XP was being discontinued and the Windows tax was a big deal at that pricepoint. Vista was a disaster and couldn't really run well on the Eee's basic specs.

People where bringing the things back.

I think there is a need for PC manufacturers to have a mechanism for all OS vendors to report BIOS bugs and similar and in turn PC manufacturers would be able to report OS bugs and similar where all of them are treated equally.

I really wish that HP, Dell or anyone else would do the same in Australia.

I cannot for the life of me buy a laptop with ubuntu preloaded today.

I look forward to this initiative spreading further :)

Why can't I buy a Mac mini clone with Ubuntu and drivers preloaded? That's the machine I want but everyone's still selling big rectangular boxes.

You don't have permission to access /2013/10/01/ubuntu-pre-installed-and-in-retail-worldwide/ on this server. WTF!

Why are you telling Amazon what I am searching for?

We are not telling Amazon what you are searching for. Your anonymity is preserved because we handle the query on your behalf. Don’t trust us? Erm, we have root. You do trust us with your data already.

http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1182

Shuttleworth founded Thawte in 1995, which specialised in digital certificates and Internet security and then sold it to VeriSign in December 1999, earning R 3.5 billion (about US$ 575 million at the time).

Verisign was founded in 1995 as a spin-off of the RSA Security certification services business. The new company received licenses to key cryptographic patents held by RSA and a time limited non-compete agreement. The new company served as a certificate authority (CA) and its initial mission was "providing trust for the Internet and Electronic Commerce through our Digital Authentication services and products." Prior to selling its certificate business to Symantec in 2010, Verisign had more than 3,000,000 certificates in operation for everything from military to financial services and retail applications, making it the largest CA behind the encryption and authentication on the Internet, which most people recognize as the small padlock icon in their Web browser when shopping online or logging into a secure website.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_key_infrastructure#Secu...

Are we supposed to connect the dots? Because I'm not seeing it...

Canonical founder has done some business back in the day with company that is two hops away from NSA and now everything he does calls back to the NSA and is part of a giant conspiracy - that is what I think I was suppose to think after reading the post.

"Don’t trust us? Erm, we have root. You do trust us with your data already."

He has a point, you know. You implicitly trust every operating system vendor you are using with everything you do on your computer. Open source makes being evil only more difficult, not impossible.

But there is still a marked difference between trusting an executable that only resides on your system vs. one that phones home search results.

It's true, I can't conceivably pour over an entire source library even if it's open, but the fact that it is open means that possibility is open for many more eyes. This puts the executables built from those sources a notch above in trustworthiness. However the search behavior is the big sticking point here.

RMS does a pretty nice breakdown of this source vs. behavior issue : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CP8CNp-vksc

Using a third-party source for search results is not the same thing as phoning home search results. Turn the feature off.

Of course it's not in the spirit of freedom, which is at the heart of the open-source movement.

That being said, you have options:

1. You can deactivate the thing with 1 click in the privacy settings, or:

2. You can yank the concerned package itself (you wouldn't have that freedom on closed-source operating systems such as Windows or MacOS/iOS).

Open-source operating systems are still infinitely better than closed-source ones, if you want to be free. Once you'll have regained your various kinds of freedom that come with it, you will never go back to closed source. That is why open-source definitely will win, in the long-run at least.

And:

There's a host of alternatives to Ubuntu, and that means: Mark knows very well that he can never go down the "evil rabbit hole" as much as platforms that lock you in can (Apple, MS) - because open-source is by definition about freedom, it's in its DNA.

Conclusion: should he f#ck up too much one day, users are 100% free to hop to the next distro and Mark would be done - you'll never get a better insurance than that.

The real worry is not Canonical misusing your data, but third-parties mis-using it. Even if Canoncial makes a mistake and goes down, in the mean time, your private information has been sent to third-parties, by default!

"Third-parties" includes Amazon, disgruntled employees, MITM, intruders, govt agencies, and so on.

> The real worry is not Canonical misusing your data, but third-parties mis-using it.

Nobody said otherwise. But, as I said: a) you have full control over the situation (easy options to fix the problem), b) Mark knows very well that he can't go further in privacy-related concessions - his credit is maxed out now.

Btw., as a reminder, have you already quit using all products and services provided by the NSA partner companies, such as: Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Skype, Yahoo, Paltalk, etc.? And do you encrypt 100% of your communication (email, chat, VOIP, VPN)? Because that's the real elephant in the room, as far as your privacy is concerned (and I'm not defending Canonical's Amazon search term deal).

"Your private information has been sent to third-parties" every time you do a search on Google. Many pieces of software do Google searches without anyone making a huge ideological stink over it.

Many people don't realize the significance of privacy. That's not a good reason to shoot down those who do.

Apart from the Amazon search there are a couple of other services that may be worth investigating and turning off:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AutomaticConnections

It's an annoyance. Canonical made a mistake entering into that deal. It takes more away from the image of Ubuntu as a no-crapware alternative than it gives them in monetization.

It took about 30 seconds to turn that off.

Somehow I would think it's also a bad move from Amazon as it hurts the perception of their brand.

I like to think of Amazon as a brand I can trust. Having crapware sponsored by Amazon on my OS hurts that trust.

Amazon is a mixed bag. For example, you don't sign your own app for the Amazon app store. This messes up data sharing if your customer bought apps from different stores, and it enables Amazon to add potentially intrusive code into the APK. Also, "associate" incentives are a big part of Amazon's marketing. I don't think they would view the Canonical deal as being bad for their image.

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