It's been really sad watching them shoot themselves in the foot like this. They seem bent on destroying their distro. Which was the first distro I really used on an old laptop after trying a few.
It's also amazing they even try because a good percentage of Ubuntu users are likely knowledgeable tech users who like to stay aware of their software. Many of them are probably former or current Microsoft or Apple users who want to avoid big corporate OS systems because of creeping advertising.
Canonical has pulled similar shit for years now. Remember the Amazon search integration? They do it again and again, yet most users stay.
And I know, someone will comment "but I totally ditched Ubuntu and my one friend did too!!!!", but how is Ubuntu still the most popular distribution? Finding snaps is easier than finding flatpacks or debs or rpms. Finding support is easier, etc. This might be just momentum, but until that is running out, it's working.
He said Ubuntu 16, I believe the Amazon search fiasco was in 2012. He simply hasn't been using Linux long enough to know that Ubuntu used to be good. His baseline user experience is probably gnome 3.
So he's comparing extra-shitty Ubuntu to shitty Ubuntu and saying it didn't used to be shitty.
I know that amazon search was there also in 16.04 because it was my first distro and in my country i only briefly heard about amazon so it looked cool to me to have one button to order something but i never clicked on it because i tought it only works in rich countries or something. At that time i didnt gave a crap about privacy i was sold on it because i liked the design of unity and the fact that it looks different than school pcs with windows so it didnt remind me school
Ubuntu actually still had the unity desktop environment when I started using it. And I wasn't happy when they switched to gnome. Thats part of why I stopped using it