Ubuntu 12.10 to ship with Amazon advertisements
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sat 22nd Sep 2012 22:07 UTC
Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu Ubuntu 12.10 will include advertisements for products on Amazon. It will look like this - if you search, product suggestions will pop up. This seems like a rather slippery slope to me, and I certainly wouldn't want this on my desktop, laptop, smartphone, tablet, or anywhere else. On the web - fine, I'm on your site, not mine - but my desktop is mine, and mine alone. Not that it matters - open source, someone will disable them. Biggest concern: does this mean my search queries get sent across the web?
E-mail Print r 1   107 Comment(s) http://osne.ws/kd7
Thread beginning with comment 536107
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Gullible Jones
Member since:
2006-05-23

So far we've got:
- Unity, a pretty GUI that is extremely annoying to use. (Why do you have to click through 3-4 things to get to the CD burner application?)
- Unnecessary 3D rubbish on the desktop, plus transparency and blur effects ad nauseum, despite the fact that Linux graphics drivers suck moose. Doing fancy stuff without the framework to support it is a recipe for failure, people.
- The apt-xapian-index cron job, which eats up all available CPU cycles for 10 minutes or so once a week so that apt-get can be a tiny bit faster. Sure you can disable it, but what do you think Uncle Jim-Bob's opinion on Ubuntu will be when his desktop goes catatonic?
- And now desktop advertising by default. Yeah, that's going to go over well.

...

BTW, how does Canonical make money? Selling tech support?

Reply Score: -1

woegjiub Member since:
2008-11-25

If you hate the mouse like I do, unity is great.
I can launch anything by hitting Meta, typing two or three letters, then hitting enter.

likewise with things like connecting VPNs, and launching menu items, from he HUD.

Unity is designed around searching and the keyboard, which is why I love it.

I'll be using it, and just removing this lens.
I don't live in the US, so Amazon sucks for me.

The eyecandy is annoying, but I didn't buy a powerful computer only to have it idle the whole time.


I think canonical make their money from support, and from leeching off of Shuttleworth's other company.

Edited 2012-09-23 06:27 UTC

Reply Parent Score: 3

Soulbender Member since:
2005-08-18

If you hate the mouse like I do, unity is great.
I can launch anything by hitting Meta, typing two or three letters, then hitting enter.

likewise with things like connecting VPNs, and launching menu items, from he HUD.

Unity is designed around searching and the keyboard, which is why I love it.


I agree. The keyboard and search focus of Unity is one of the reasons I too love it. If just the SSH lens would get fixed to understand ecdsa.

The eyecandy is annoying, but I didn't buy a powerful computer only to have it idle the whole time.

I don't really know why eyecandy people are complaining about. I don't see any useless effects and the default ones are useful to me.
At least there are no wobbly windows and crap like that.
Besides, if you don't want the effects you can use Unity 2d which is functionally equivalent to Unity 3d.

Reply Parent Score: 3

Rehdon Member since:
2005-07-06

If you hate the mouse like I do, unity is great.
[...]
Unity is designed around searching and the keyboard, which is why I love it.


I think you nailed it perfectly, namely the reason why Ubuntu (and Gnome Shell) have alienated a good share of their users: they got rid of a perfectly working paradigm (WIMP) to adopt one that appeals to a much smaller audience.

It's not only that they tried to fix what wasn't broken, but that the fix is much worse than what we had before. Hint: when you're playing catchup with the bigger players and want to expand your current user base, you either come up with such an incredibly good new thing that everyone will fall for it, or you play it safe and slowly build on what you had before. Unity (and Gnome Shell) failed miserably at the former while giving up to the latter for the sake of "innovation", which explains the current pitiful, fragmented, buggy (3D desktop by default because you privilege the bling to functionality? when you still don't have decent support for that? that's nonsense) state of the Linux desktop.

There, I said it, much as I don't like it the fact is that the Linux desktop is in much worse shape today than it was two years ago.

Rehdon

Reply Parent Score: 1

Read more of this thread... >
Sodapop Member since:
2005-07-06

You and Soulbender sound like perfect candidates for a Smart Phone or Tablet. A very small minority of people prefer this type of behavior on a Desktop.

Have you tried a Tablet or Smart Phone? Sounds like that's what you really need instead of a Desktop. Just saying.

Reply Parent Score: 1

Read more of this thread... >
UltraZelda64 Member since:
2006-12-05

"Unnecessary 3D rubbish on the desktop, plus transparency and blur effects ad nauseum, despite the fact that Linux graphics drivers suck moose. Doing fancy stuff without the framework to support it is a recipe for failure, people."

QFT. Hate to say it, but you nailed it right there. GNOME is also guilty. Maybe before fully working and fully capable open-source drivers are available for nVidia and ATI cards on Linux, Unity and GNOME will have their 2D capability and feature sets up to par with their 3D counterparts.

Why they chose to go 3D first and 2D later never made any sense to me, for the same reason you mentioned. It makes sense with Apple and Microsoft since they've got all the hardware companies in their pockets and can basically do what they want and the companies will agree, but Linux or any other open source OS? What the hell?

Reply Parent Score: 2