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5mo ago

Remember back when Ubuntu put ads in the dash? I do (~2014)

71 comments

Ads?! in Ubuntu? Never! They were simply "integrating online scope results into the home lens of the dash" 🤡
(that is an actual quote from the sentence immediately following "We’re not putting ads in Ubuntu" in Mark Shuttleworth's blog post responding to the entirely predictable backlash after they did this, twelve years ago...)
- Mark Richard Shuttleworth (born 18 September 1973) is a South African and British entrepreneur who is the founder and CEO of Canonical, the company behind the development of the Linux-based Ubuntu operating system.[1] In 2002, Shuttleworth became the first South African to travel to space, doing so as a space tourist.[2][3][4] He lives on the Isle of Man and holds dual citizenship from South Africa and the United Kingdom.[5][6] According to the Sunday Times Rich List in 2020, Shuttleworth is worth an estimated £500 million. --Wikipedia
  This explains so much.
  
  He the Linux world's mini elon musk

I remember. And how much shit the community flung towards them. And their rep is still stained with it, as it should be.
- The ads and the Amazon thing will follow Canonical forever

Oh wait, they removed that? I had no idea because I stopped using Ubuntu when they put ads in the dash.
- Doesn't mean they stopped pushing their own shit in places that they have no business touching. I mean:
  apt install firefox
  look inside
  snap
  And then there's Ubuntu Pro. https://feddit.org/comment/2001630
  (edit) I just realized that I could've expressed the first point using proper English, but my idiot brain immediately chose memes. I think I'm beyond help.
  
  I haven't used Ubuntu in ages but holy shit that's awful...
  
  They're planning on making a version where everything is a snap. Performance and usability may come later, who knows.
  
  I will never understand why that 2 lines in the terminal bother anyone. It's a free service. Free as in free beer. If you use the terminal, you are tech-savvy enough to disable it, if you don't use the terminal, you'll not see it anywhere, at all.
  While we are at it, they advertise all of their products like that in the terminal, not just Ubuntu pro. Landscape and microk8s both appear like that on an ssh login.

That was the first time I tried Linux with the free and open thing. I didn't know much back then and when I saw the ads, I was like... Ooohhh this is ad supported crap. Nope... Not at all
Fucking distro kept me away from my spirit penguin for 2 years before I realized it was ubuntu's fault.

They were heavily panned for that back then. My image of Ubuntu of that time is heavily associated with their Unity desktop which they latter dropped(only for it to spring up again).
- I still think they should never be able to escape the controversy. It was 10 years ago but the possibly that it could be reintroduced still exists.
  
  They've never given me the vibe that that reversal of course was permanent, or that other things they do aren't similarly anti-user
- I liked Unity. Like, a lot.
  
  Yes, it made Ubuntu standout with its own home brewn DE.
- Oh no! Another DE to choose from? How awful!

This is precisely why I dislike and don't recommend Ubuntu, to this day.
- They lost so much trust when they did that, truly an insane, shortsighted decision.
  
  Not just Ubuntu, but Canonical as well.
- Same, I just use standard Debian now, works great for me.
  
  I was using Debian on desktop for a while. I've been using Debian on servers for over 20 years so I figured it's a good choice. I liked it, but ended up switching to Fedora. The only Linux distro I can use at work is Fedora (we use a modified version of Fedora) and I liked it enough to start using it at home too.
  I appreciate the newer packages, especially for things like KDE Plasma and the Nvidia drivers. For example, Fedora had KDE Plasma 6.1 before Debian had even started packaging 6.0 for experimental.
- That's also the stop I disembarked that train for desktops. I don't know why I continued using them for some servers but their behavior with Snaps has me leaving for good.
  
  Yeah Canonical is the Google of GNU/Linux
- Exactly why I avoided ubuntu (and ubuntu bases) for soo long I used it in a vm yes but i bearly did anything the ubuntu bases was not that bad but every distro was based on ubuntu except for arch,fedora etc and that's why I chose fedora instead of popos now I just use arch base bcs I kinda don't like how fedora only includes open source software

At least they learned and stopped doing it.
- The ads are inside the terminal now
  
  Are the ads in the room with us right now?
  Edit: I thought it was obvious that this was a joke, my mistake.
  https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/is-x-in-the-room-with-us-right-now

That's a real screenshot?
- Yes

I don't. I migrated to Arch in 2011 or 2012 btw. Fuck I feel old.

Huh, I was using Ubuntu as my daily driver circa 2014 and I don't remember this at all... maybe I stopped just prior to them implementing it... or maybe it just didn't make enough of an impression for me to notice.
- It was also fairly easy to disable
  
  Ehh... not at first. That was a later release.
  
  Ohhh I probably disabled it right away and then forgot about it.
- It could have been earlier? i tried Ubuntu around 2012. I didn't know how to get rid of the Amazon stuff, and it turned me off Linux...thinking why use this OS that is ad based....wasn't till 2017 when W10 made our computers slow that I tried linux again.

Pepperidge Farm remembers

This may be kind of a dumb question, but would it affect Mint in any way if Canonical were to reintroduce ads? I know Mint's a fork but I'm not sure how integrated that part of the OS is.
- Probably not as the Mint Team would either not be affected or they would have a cow.
  When snap came out the Mint team got pissed and started maintaining the packages removed from Ubuntu
- It wouldn't be worse than snap integration which Mint already doesn't use. Also Mint have a backup plan called LMDE if things go sour.
  
  I always got this feeling that LMDE will eventually become Mint's main distro, with the Ubuntu-based version slowly fading away.

I missed all the fun because there was no ads in my country, and the Amazon app was just a weird western thing removed right away. Unity was pretty good though.
- I'm pretty sure that Canada is considered west
  
  I'm pretty sure I wasn't born here, detective.

Yup, that was when I switched off ubuntu to debian

This shit probably put me off trying out Linux for years.
- Hopefully you've tried another distro by now, and also know to avoid big corporate distros best you can
  
  Been using Mint for a few years now.
- Same

didn't they also put ads for ubuntu pro in your .bashrc?
- That's still there but it appears when you use apt, it's not in .bashrc.

Not ads, actual Amazon search results. The good old times when Big Tech wasn't so radicalizingly big.

Canonical would prob do something like this today like how shove snaps

I think they were just doing a bit
"the ads are coming from inside the house"

71 comments