How do pre-installed ads violate any free-software doctrine? One can still access/modify the source code of any part of the operating system (except proprietary drivers). It does not attempt to hinder a users ability to do anything with the computer.
An example of a free-software violation would be the bittorent clients, which have to way to disable obeying the private bit. While one does have access to the source code, and can therefore modify this themselves, the software is designed with the explicit intention to remove the users freedom to dis-obey the private bit.
Adds are annoying, but do not affect any user freedoms.
Here is a quote of a quote of the technology director of Canocial:
"Another addition is that we will be including Launcher web apps icons to
Amazon and the Ubuntu One Music Store by default. We feel that these
icons will provide convenient access to these resources for our users
and also benefit the project with the generation of affiliate revenue in
those cases that these resources are used. If our users choose to not
use these Launcher icons, they can be easily removed by the user by
dragging the icon to the trash."
I got that from the linked forum, but haven't searched the mailing lists to validate it.
What about Firefox which has shipped with Google search default since forever, which Google pays Mozilla for, which Google makes money on? Will you never use Firefox again?
Hmm, that's a valid point. I just have the idea of Linux distributions as being completely free and non-profit oriented. Also I'm used to the OS having no ads by itself, only on webpages. Guess I overreacted.
You may wanna read up on what free software actually is. The free used by the FSF generally denotes that you have access to the source code and are free to modify and redistribute it.
That is my favorite Ubuntu release. I was on it for the longest period till last month when I shifted to Lubuntu 12.04. I have lost out on a few things, but I was getting tired of hunting for alternate sources of software for their latest version.
Lubuntu 12.04 is unbelievably good. Everything works out of the box and it just stays out of your way. You can choose Openbox at the login screen too. Highly recommended.
Lubuntu 12.04 is fantastic on my netbook, which I use for writing and other offline tasks where I don't want to be distracted. I don't think I'd be as high on it for a desktop or a daily-driver laptop, but I have a retina MBP for that.
So? If you are used to Ubuntu's filesystem layout, package management, etc. it makes much more sense to go for Debian or a well-maintained Ubuntu distribution such as Mint. Also, Mint has gnome-shell and Nautilus forks that bring back a lot of sanity.
Anyway, this is all a non-discussion for an experienced user, since the lens can be removed easily. Also, Ubuntu 12.10 is still beta, so they might still remove this functionality or make a separate shopping lens, or whatever.
Last time I tried Fedora (it was maybe 3 years ago), I tried to play an MP3 on my thumb drive and it failed to do so, then asked me to pay money for an MP3 codec license.
10.04 is still the best Ubuntu, if newcomers to Linux want simplicity and usability that's what I recommend whether they're not very tech savvy or programmers. I still use it on my work laptop. (I've been using Gentoo on my home devices since 2007 or so.) The .deb model of packaging is sane, Ubuntu just can't be trusted anymore with what comes installed out of the box and what's available to install/uninstall out of the box.
I'm still looking for a good Ubuntu/Debian derivative that's at least as good as 10.04. Xubuntu is always a "good enough" option in many respects. A lot of people recommend Mint and I don't see why. But I'm also very biased in favor of Gnome2.
I used 10.04 for quite a long time and am now on 11.10 without Unity, I grew quite tired of always having incredibly outdated packages on 10.04 (the great utility of "sudo apt-get install and it will always just work" being the only reason I haven't switched to Windows or Mac yet). That being said I still use 10.04 on all of my servers
I'm on a recently installed Fedora. I figured that it would be what I would settle with once I got tired of fiddling with things on Arch. A pretty good selling point was that it would readily handle our dual scanner and printer without me having to deal with the HPLIP software package, but I suppose this is a somewhat appropriate occasion to rant on a few bits. Some of them may be related to software Fedora is composed of, such as Gnome 3.
Non-administators can't add a password through the graphical dialogue if they are currently without password. "Choose password at next login" was the next best option for fellow family members interested in trying out Linux.
The infamous obscurity of the power off and restart buttons. You can read all about it on Google. Family members are sure to reach for the physical power off button and do cold shut downs once they want to use Windows.
The Firewall thing assured me that SSH is a trusted protocol, but incoming SSH connections were met with "No route to host." Disabling the Firewall fixed this.
Selecting Terminal in Activities gives focus to a currently open Terminal. Opening new Terminals can be done through the File dialogue.
Entering a non-existing command results in a very noticeable delay before the prompt returns.
I haven't found a way to enable focus follows mouse. Instructions on the web seem outdated.
I was met with a confusing "Enter password to unlock login keyring" window when trying to set up instant messaging accounts. I'm not sure, but it may have something to do with my changing from the original Fedora user password, or with using passwd. Empathy didn't really work out for me because of detail-lacking connection error messages.
These are some of the surprises I have encountered during the first day of working on it. I will probably stick with it for quite a while as it is acceptable to work on.
I can live with this (or uninstall it) but will they fix my audio? It had been fine after about 8.04, but has been broken by every update that included Unity by default.
Yeah ... been there and done that. I've also added the PA volume control as recommended by others. Funny that one problem can be solved by two completely opposite actions (or in my case remains unsolved in both).
pulseaudio actually brings some nice features to the linux desktop
pulseaudio bashing was cool a couple years ago, you're late to the party
And - quite frankly - the GP didn't state his problems at all, so you were just trolling (-> 'Remove this software package that really is just an elaborate hoax to destroy sound. The internet says so!')
Yeah, I guess my reply was kinda snarky. The simple fact is that every time sound didn't work out of the box on a Debian-based system (especially Ubuntu), removing pulseaudio was all that was needed to fix it.
Honestly, if Ubuntu dropped their ridiculous, underdeveloped, undersupported Ubuntu One services and partnered with Amazon to integrate theirs (Cloud Player/Cloud Drive/etc), that would be a MAJOR improvement for both them and the end-user. Excellent cross-platform cloud services and marketplaces integrated with the OS would be great for bringing less-technical users to the platform in the wake of the proposed "Windows 8 exodus" (if it actually happens).
Instead, they're using... basically affiliate links. Instead of a real monetization strategy involving a real partnership, they're using the "blogger who just realized he could make money off of this thing" strategy.
I've done partnership deals with Amazon's BD department before. They're very wary of just going head-first into a long-term deal without some kind of "feeling out" process to make sure the two companies are going to get along.
I wouldn't be surprised if this isn't their "feeling out" period before launching exactly what you're suggesting in a year or so.
I would love that, I have never seen any interest to subscribe to their Ubuntu One service. I would be pleased to access Amazon Cloud from Ubuntu, and have a system-wide integration. Hope this is their long term strategy.
But converting Ubuntu One to using Amazon services wouldn't be an affiliate deal, presumably, right? That would be a high-level, "we'll shut down a competitor to EC2/S3/… if you pay us X MM/year" sort of thing. It would also endanger their just-released-10-days-ago music store, if Amazon (their new X MM/year revenue stream), comes to them and asks forcefully.
An affiliate deal seems to make a much lighter impact to Ubuntu's ability to make independent decisions, in part because the revenue stream is less and also because the service is somewhat fungible–Ubuntu can switch to another online retailer (or suite of retailers).
Also, the perceived switching costs for a consumer to convert from Ubuntu One to Cloud Drive is going to be a helluva lot higher than `sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping` (unless they make ubuntu-desktop a dependent package, making apt return a scary message)
I think there is a real need for an open *nix desktop that is friendly to a broad base of users - which is how I see Ubuntu. If a canonical/amazon "itunes" is the way to finance it, then fine. I'd rather them monetize a peripheral service, perhaps an itunes-esque offering, and support a strong linux desktop market, than see them waste away.
But I worry about slippery slopes ... will rightsholders demand DRM that subverts openness?
Running those services themselves, such as Cloud Drive, the music store, etc. was never a good idea in the first place.
By trying to do too much too soon they were only ever going to produce second rate products compared to the competition (a company with the resources of Microsoft can barely win some of these verticals, let alone Canonical).
It was always going to end with them stripping out and shutting down their own solutions and integrating with the best possible partners with each service.
I think Cloud drive/player was in part an aggressive move against bitlocker licensing; the labels didn't allow multiple download licenses and Amazon launched this and claimed a purchase was a single download into your personal locker and future downloads were from your personal space, effectively skirting the issue. I believe they later negotiated licenses but they were probably operating from a stronger position at that point.
I'm not happy about it, but for many of the less computer-savvy users, I don't see why this should be a big problem. They may very well be interested in this feature, and it still beats paying an exorbitant amount (comparably) just to use Office or Photoshop, or whatever it is that compels people to get Apple computers.
Some us already support websites by shopping through their Amazon links. Why not support Ubuntu?
If this is because they were not getting enough donations from the users, then I am disappointed in us for not supporting them (I give $25 annually, maybe it is time to up that to $50).
If they are getting enough in donations, but they just got a taste for money, then I am disappointed in them for compromising the spirit of open source (even if it adheres to the doctrine).
If they are getting enough in donations but really want the capital to take Ubuntu to the next level, then I am disappointed in all of us (especially me) who just couldn't find the time and energy to join the project, write some damn code, and help make the project great.
But at least this last one is an interesting prospect...
It is... What I would like is a separate shopping lens, where you could search for books, albums, and movies. Preferably, it would search a few competing sites and return the best offers. They could make them affiliate links.
But getting books about empathy in my Dash when launching a chat client is plain silly.
I don't mean it as an attack, but it really reflects badly on the movement when people talk about "the spirit of Open Source" that way.
Historically, the "spirit" of Open Source (or the motivation to part from the FSF, which was the birth of the movement) was to present whatever was happening in the Free Software world to businesses precisely with the goal of attracting money. Loads of it.
Open Source is a method of work. It says, my value is not in my source code, I'm not afraid of sharing it with the world (as a matter of facts, I get more value by doing so). But it is furthermost a methodology aimed at helping businesses make more money. (Or else all this commotion would've never happened in the late 90s and we'd all be still calling it Free Software).
Canonical is a business. It needs money and if you've ever owned a business, or worked in a financial position in one, you know there's no such thing as "getting enough". If they don't make money, they'll die and the project might terminate. Take it or leave it.
That being said, I chose to leave it a while back, for very similar reasons (I moved to Debian which was familiar and more ... free). But I cannot say I'm surprised they do similar deals, and cannot stand by when people accuse them of ... not following some convenient definition that was never there to begin with.
It all depends upon the details of implementation. If they're spamming the user with "and before you open this window our sponsor would like to bring you this message..." then that would be pretty bad, and I'd stop using Ubuntu as a result. On the other hand, if you can use the lens to do shopping and get reasonable search results from a range of companies configurable by location, etc, then I think that would be a useful feature. If you're just limited to shopping with one company then that would also be bad (anti-competitive).
Frankly, if they give me Amazon results only, that's fine by me. I often end up buying from Amazon even when they're more expensive due to Prime. If I could buy without even going to their website, that'd be perfect.
Following the link, it appears that the unity search will simply also return Amazon results. This could be cool or not - in any case it is easy to uninstall apparently.
I use the amazon search via DuckDuckGo all the time in Firefox. Granted, I still tell DDG explicitly to search Amazon (via !), but it is not a far step to simply returning it always.
Maybe adding something like the !-notation for special searches to unity would be the golden way.
I felt that way at first, but I'm pretty happy with it now. The 12.04.1 stuff seems solid to me, and now that I'm comfortable with the new interface, I like it fine.
If their goal was to provide something that novices could get comfortable with quickly, I think they did a good job. It fell down for me in making the transition easy for people comfortable with the old UI, but that's clearly an audience they didn't intend to address, so I'm willing to cut them some slack.
I love Unity. It's the best Linux desktop I've had. I've used Linux on my desktop since '95, and Unity is the first Linux desktop UI that I feel is as snappy and productive as my Amiga used to be (yes, seriously)...
Might I instead suggest a 'supporter' icon somewhere obvious?
How I want it to work: I click on the icon and get taken to a page that shows whether I've donated. If I do, I say how long the donation is for. (E.g., I choose $10 and 6 months.) My icon goes green across all my machines and I feel smug. In 6 months, it looks sickly, so I click on it and donate again.
As long as this stays Unity-only, I wonder if the other Ubuntu-based distros (Xubuntu, Kubuntu, etc.) will see a surge in users. Even if the ads can be removed, this move still sours me on Ubuntu more than a little.
The whole Unity search thing is based around searching -everything-, not just programs, in a manner akin to Spotlight or Android's search. This isn't a radical shift on the UI end.
You're not by default searching just programs when you search via Unity in the first place.
The default for me is a combined pane that shows recent apps, recent files and downloads. If I start typing a search term, whichever categories has matches show up.
If I want a specific category, such as just applications, I can select that.
Maybe they'll change the defaults, or ask question during install, but I suspect most of the people who might care will easily figure out how to remove/disable it.
(Frankly Unity is the most productive UI I've had since my Amiga days. I was planning on installing a tiling WM before I tried it, but then I ended up staying with Unity because it was such a smooth experience, even with far less tweaking than what I'm used to have to do.
My most frequently used apps are all just one key combination away. Everything else one key + search. I run most stuff full screen, but with the global menu enabled in most apps, most apps waste very little space even when I "just" have them fill all the available space. It's the closest approximation Amiga-style screens using workspaces I've experienced on Linux.
The only thing I hate is the loss of spatial file browsing)
Eh, Google is forcing this experience on Android users with their batallion of Play apps (Apps, Magazines, Books, Videos, Toilet Paper, etc) and people seem to tolerate it.
In general it's not good to use that command because it can leave your system in an inconsistent state -- when there are packages which depend on the package you just removed. apt-get works out the dependencies.
What are you talking about? dpkg will not remove packages with dependencies unless you force it to:
root@fw:~# dpkg -P libssl1.0.0
dpkg: dependency problems prevent removal of libssl1.0.0:amd64:
python-openssl depends on libssl1.0.0 (>= 1.0.0).
openssh-client depends on libssl1.0.0 (>= 1.0.1).
ntp depends on libssl1.0.0 (>= 1.0.0).
...SNIP...
bind9-host depends on libssl1.0.0 (>= 1.0.0).
tor depends on libssl1.0.0 (>= 1.0.1).
tcpdump depends on libssl1.0.0 (>= 1.0.0).
libruby1.8 depends on libssl1.0.0 (>= 1.0.0).
postfix depends on libssl1.
dpkg: error processing libssl1.0.0:amd64 (--purge):
dependency problems - not removing
Errors were encountered while processing:
libssl1.0.0:amd64
or
root@fw:~# dpkg -P coreutils
dpkg: error processing coreutils (--purge):
This is an essential package - it should not be removed.
Errors were encountered while processing:
coreutils
Take a look at --force-help for more info on forcing things.
You said: "In general it's not good to use that command because it can leave your system in an inconsistent state -- when there are packages which depend on the package you just removed."
I demonstrated that dpkg will not remove packages with dependencies. Furthermore some packages are so crucial (ie: essential) that dpkg does not even bother checking dependencies before erroring out.
The reason I gave was incorrect (I was confused with what happens when you install a .deb file without installing its dependencies), but the point of apt-get being better than dpkg for this still stands.
I don't understand why you're making such a big fuss about this rather inconsequental point. All I'm saying is that you should generally use apt-get and not the lower level tool dpkg. I used an incorrect justification for that (removing doesn't lead to an inconsistent state), but you still should preferrably use apt-get. Let's get back to debating more interesting stuff now.
I'm not the only one that thinks your claim is left wanting. I cannot speak for them but I am interested in why you think apt-get is preferred over dpkg in this case because I am a decade long loyal user of Debian. My original point was that the dpkg command is shorter and that is why I have used it over the longer apt-get invocation. I am generally interested in learning more about Debian. If the way I have been doing things is wrong I would like to know why so that I can improve my skills. Does that make sense?
I'm not being snarky, I'm generally interested in learning more about Debian and it seems that you might be able to improve my knowledge.
I know. Most of it is just a matter of aptitude not being around 12 years ago. I really like the search and install related packages functionality of aptitude.
Okay fine "wrong" is perhaps too strong, it's rather "not appropriate/ideal". My point was simply that dpkg is lower level, so it should not be the go-to tool for normal users. The comment which started all this was the comment suggesting a command with "dpkg" was 'better' (because it was a few characters shorter I suppose), and I merely chimed in to point out that that was probably not a good thing to say, thinking of how this lower level tool provides more potential for mucking up your system; e.g., accidentally trying to remove an essential package; I believe dpkg wouldn't ask for confirmation right? Also new users would probably be overwhelmed by all the options of dpkg.
The only time I've been forced to use dpkg in the past ten years was when the system was seriously messed up e.g. in the middle of a failed upgrade.
> "this lower level tool provides more potential for mucking up your system; e.g., accidentally trying to remove an essential package; I believe dpkg wouldn't ask for confirmation right?"
Did you read anything I wrote? I specifically mentioned that dpkg would not remove an essential package...twice:
In my initial reply I demonstrated that dpkg would not remove an essential package:
root@fw:~# dpkg -P coreutils
dpkg: error processing coreutils (--purge):
This is an essential package - it should not be removed.
Errors were encountered while processing:
coreutils
And in my second reply I simply restated what my example had demonstrated:
"Furthermore some packages are so crucial (ie: essential) that dpkg does not even bother checking dependencies before erroring out."
> "The only time I've been forced to use dpkg in the past ten years was when the system was seriously messed up e.g. in the middle of a failed upgrade."
Just because the only time you had to use dpkg was when your system was messed up does not mean that dpkg is likely to mess up your system. Its like saying that the emergency room causes life threatening trauma because the only time I was seriously injured I had to go to the emergency room.
Does anyone know if there a name for this kind of fallacious reasoning? It seems like an amalgamation of "post hoc ergo propter hoc" and "cum hoc ergo propter hoc."
Yes, in this particular case dpkg will behave perfectly well.
The OP is, I believe, trying to argue that apt-get is in general less likely to blow your foot off, therefore you should default to using apt-get in general since it makes you less likely to lose a foot in the long run.
If you prefer to memorise specific safe cases for brevity of typing, that's absolutely fine. The OP, I think, prefers not to do so, and the same goes for me.
Assuming I'm correct in describing the OP's argument, hopefully you can now both go "oh, okay, that's what he meant" and move on :)
When removing packages it just doesn't matter. When installing, it also doesn't really matter. dpkg can't fetch packages from the repositories, but it will mark them and a following apt-get install -f will fetch them flawlessly.
A few years ago you had to be careful when mixing apt-get and aptitude, and thus probably also when mixing aptitude with dpkg, as far as i know that is not the case anymore. Even a following autoremove should work.
You haven't mentioned one single valid cause why it should be wrong to use dpkg, and I'm pretty confident that you won't, because afaik it isn't. And i'm pretty sure.
(Just jumping in because dfc mentioning he really wants to know. Just think about apt-get as a frontend for dpkg which calls dpkg to install and remove .debs, but also fetches them from the internet and notices when they are no longer needed because they were installed as a dependency for a now removed package.)
I wonder what point you're talking about. The one and only point you made was that dpkg force removes packages at runtime and it doesn't do that. What other point is there?
When I used LXDE, it had a long way to go before it could be considered equivalent to Xfce, and I ended up switching back. The ultra-lightweight window managers may be in fashion, but Xfce is mature and polished and easy enough for my mother to use, and I can't say that about Lubuntu.
The typical Ubuntu user probably won't miss much on Xubuntu. When they find that mrxvt doesn't let them use Ctrl-C/V to copy and paste, they'll be mystified. Ditto for Openbox's wu wei panel management.
I use tint2 as a "panel" of sorts in Openbox, and modify menu.xml for anything else I need. I like it well enough. Also, modifying rc.xml allows one to set hotkeys.
I had a similar experience. Xfce could handle my differently-sized dual-monitor setup easily. LXDE failed such that it thought to put some things off-screen where I could never reach them.
If this is an important part of the user experience, why can't Canonical provide an "Advertisements" or "Amazon" settings UI that can turn these features on and off by a checkbox?
My guess is because they know if they make it too easy to turn off, and the ads aren't actually improving their users' lives (ads for books when you search for apps?! Might make sense for technical books I guess...) everyone will just turn off the ads.
Making it this hard to turn off a new feature because you don't trust it will help the users... must be heartbreaking to sell out your users like that.
In fact, I just realised that I really like Ubuntu and would happily make a monthly donation to support it (and can afford to) but I've never seen anything that suggested I do so.
I can't find any hints on ubuntu.com on how to donate (though they have a shop, I don't want any "swag").
Shuttleworth has always said he wants to make it a viable business; perhaps he's worried people would donate instead of having their business buy support (or whatever). Hrm.
EDIT: I searched their site and found the donate page. It doesn't seem to be linked from anywhere; only discoverable by using search.
They both have python3 versions available, too (3.1.3 and 3.2.3 respectively). There are legitimate complaints about Debian, but being stuck on python 2.4 is not one of them.
My mistake. I installed Debian stable about 3 months ago, but Numpy was ridiculously out of date. I falsely remembered it being Python itself. Mea culpa.
Debian Stable doesn't break - it is The Other Linux when it comes to servers. Debian Testing and Debian Unstable do occasionally break... but that's kind've in their names.
I have ran Debian Testing for a couple of years now and it has broke less for me than Ubuntu used to do. I am very impressed with the stability of something called Testing.
Mint used to set Firefox's default search engine a customized (read: craptastic) version of Google that's designed to rake in the ad revenue. I wouldn't have a problem with it if it wasn't utterly useless and ugly as sin. (It looked like the Google site search for webmasters.)
Now the default search engine is DuckDuckGo. I have no idea if they have a revshare agreement with them.
I hear you: it sucked. But no matter how much a default setting might suck, it is still a "setting", as in, it can be changed. Unity got Canonical started down a very slippery slope. I can't imagine they're dog-fooding this crap.
I find it distasteful because it means that in searches which naive users may be accustomed to being local searches of their computer, those search queries are also being passed to some third-party (Amazon) API. If they're interested in this revenue stream, I suspect Ubuntu isn't going to make a big deal of this information leakage at installation time.
Why don't they just ask for money from users? Have two versions: an ad supported one which people can easily remove the ads, and a paid version that doesn't come with the ad package by default, and maybe a few extra "premium" perks like wallpapers, themes, whatever that aren't in the FOSS repos together with extra backup space. They could charge on a par with OS X, say a total of $29 for the next two versions.
If you're referring to the price, well, that was covered by another comment.
Ubuntu's full of non-free software and binary blobs. This is why it pretty much works out of the box. There's little fucking around with drivers, non-free codecs, etc.
In any event, adding non-free "premium" features doesn't make the operating system itself any less free.
>For example, when you want to search for “dishwashers” on Amazon you can just enter “Dishwashers” in the Dash and a small line of “suggested items” from Amazon will appear.
>The same happens when you search for a local file or app from the Home Lens.
>So yes, you can expect to see self-help guides on compassion when trying to launch Empathy.
>‘More Suggestions’ is a strange turn of phrase; most people don’t tend to expect product suggestions when looking for their e-mail app. But I can cede that it’s a far better name than that used in development: ‘treat yourself’
Showing ads when you search locally seems a tad much and a waste of system resources. Isn't this equivalent to showing shopping ads based on keyword searches in Spotlight and the Windows Start menu?
Edit: Just realized that I sometimes type keywords to find local files matching filenames and content that's personal in nature. Does this mean all those keywords are sent to Amazon and perhaps data mined to show personalized results?
I'm pretty sure the implementation of lenses in the Unity dash is conceptually similar to pages in a web browser. You would have to switch to the shopping lens before your keystrokes were pushed to the search provider (Amazon in this case). So perhaps roughly equivalent to adding extra default tabs to your web browser minus the initial load privacy leak.
You can add them to the home dash as well (or whatever their terminology is) which would send your normal search keystrokes, but that hasn't been the default for any other net based queries in the past.
> Edit: Just realized that I sometimes type keywords to find local files matching filenames and content that's personal in nature. Does this mean all those keywords are sent to Amazon and perhaps data mined to show personalized results?
Exactly my concern as well. It honestly seems like an awfully broad spray to have these results on every search – why not just make it a selectable mode instead of populating every time?
> Just realized that I sometimes type keywords to find local files matching filenames and content that's personal in nature. Does this mean all those keywords are sent to Amazon and perhaps data mined to show personalized results?
That would have been fine for me if Amazon din't make it really obvious. Every damn time I search for something while signed in I am sure to receive an email from them the very next day suggesting similar items. It was even wierder when I watched a documentary about sex on xbox's amazon video and the next day I received an email talking about my "interest". So now I have to do all my lookups in incognito mode and will only sign in when I am ready to make the purchase.
239 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 273 ms ] threadAn example of a free-software violation would be the bittorent clients, which have to way to disable obeying the private bit. While one does have access to the source code, and can therefore modify this themselves, the software is designed with the explicit intention to remove the users freedom to dis-obey the private bit.
Adds are annoying, but do not affect any user freedoms.
EDIT: Discussion on ubuntuforums: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2060764
Here is a quote of a quote of the technology director of Canocial:
"Another addition is that we will be including Launcher web apps icons to Amazon and the Ubuntu One Music Store by default. We feel that these icons will provide convenient access to these resources for our users and also benefit the project with the generation of affiliate revenue in those cases that these resources are used. If our users choose to not use these Launcher icons, they can be easily removed by the user by dragging the icon to the trash."
I got that from the linked forum, but haven't searched the mailing lists to validate it.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping
ps- Aadvertising Aardvark? Commercial Coelacanth?
Lubuntu 12.04 is unbelievably good. Everything works out of the box and it just stays out of your way. You can choose Openbox at the login screen too. Highly recommended.
The RHEL 6 clones (CentOS, PUIAS Linux, Scientific Linux) have Gnome 2.x and support for ages.
Anyway, this is all a non-discussion for an experienced user, since the lens can be removed easily. Also, Ubuntu 12.10 is still beta, so they might still remove this functionality or make a separate shopping lens, or whatever.
10.04 is still the best Ubuntu, if newcomers to Linux want simplicity and usability that's what I recommend whether they're not very tech savvy or programmers. I still use it on my work laptop. (I've been using Gentoo on my home devices since 2007 or so.) The .deb model of packaging is sane, Ubuntu just can't be trusted anymore with what comes installed out of the box and what's available to install/uninstall out of the box.
I'm still looking for a good Ubuntu/Debian derivative that's at least as good as 10.04. Xubuntu is always a "good enough" option in many respects. A lot of people recommend Mint and I don't see why. But I'm also very biased in favor of Gnome2.
Non-administators can't add a password through the graphical dialogue if they are currently without password. "Choose password at next login" was the next best option for fellow family members interested in trying out Linux.
The infamous obscurity of the power off and restart buttons. You can read all about it on Google. Family members are sure to reach for the physical power off button and do cold shut downs once they want to use Windows.
The Firewall thing assured me that SSH is a trusted protocol, but incoming SSH connections were met with "No route to host." Disabling the Firewall fixed this.
Selecting Terminal in Activities gives focus to a currently open Terminal. Opening new Terminals can be done through the File dialogue.
Entering a non-existing command results in a very noticeable delay before the prompt returns.
I haven't found a way to enable focus follows mouse. Instructions on the web seem outdated.
I was met with a confusing "Enter password to unlock login keyring" window when trying to set up instant messaging accounts. I'm not sure, but it may have something to do with my changing from the original Fedora user password, or with using passwd. Empathy didn't really work out for me because of detail-lacking connection error messages.
These are some of the surprises I have encountered during the first day of working on it. I will probably stick with it for quite a while as it is acceptable to work on.
%> sudo reboot
You're welcome.
pulseaudio works fine for the majority of users.
pulseaudio actually brings some nice features to the linux desktop
pulseaudio bashing was cool a couple years ago, you're late to the party
And - quite frankly - the GP didn't state his problems at all, so you were just trolling (-> 'Remove this software package that really is just an elaborate hoax to destroy sound. The internet says so!')
And .. 'you're welcome' is really low..
Instead, they're using... basically affiliate links. Instead of a real monetization strategy involving a real partnership, they're using the "blogger who just realized he could make money off of this thing" strategy.
I wouldn't be surprised if this isn't their "feeling out" period before launching exactly what you're suggesting in a year or so.
An affiliate deal seems to make a much lighter impact to Ubuntu's ability to make independent decisions, in part because the revenue stream is less and also because the service is somewhat fungible–Ubuntu can switch to another online retailer (or suite of retailers).
Also, the perceived switching costs for a consumer to convert from Ubuntu One to Cloud Drive is going to be a helluva lot higher than `sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping` (unless they make ubuntu-desktop a dependent package, making apt return a scary message)
But I worry about slippery slopes ... will rightsholders demand DRM that subverts openness?
By trying to do too much too soon they were only ever going to produce second rate products compared to the competition (a company with the resources of Microsoft can barely win some of these verticals, let alone Canonical).
It was always going to end with them stripping out and shutting down their own solutions and integrating with the best possible partners with each service.
Some us already support websites by shopping through their Amazon links. Why not support Ubuntu?
If this is because they were not getting enough donations from the users, then I am disappointed in us for not supporting them (I give $25 annually, maybe it is time to up that to $50).
If they are getting enough in donations, but they just got a taste for money, then I am disappointed in them for compromising the spirit of open source (even if it adheres to the doctrine).
If they are getting enough in donations but really want the capital to take Ubuntu to the next level, then I am disappointed in all of us (especially me) who just couldn't find the time and energy to join the project, write some damn code, and help make the project great.
But at least this last one is an interesting prospect...
But getting books about empathy in my Dash when launching a chat client is plain silly.
Historically, the "spirit" of Open Source (or the motivation to part from the FSF, which was the birth of the movement) was to present whatever was happening in the Free Software world to businesses precisely with the goal of attracting money. Loads of it.
Open Source is a method of work. It says, my value is not in my source code, I'm not afraid of sharing it with the world (as a matter of facts, I get more value by doing so). But it is furthermost a methodology aimed at helping businesses make more money. (Or else all this commotion would've never happened in the late 90s and we'd all be still calling it Free Software).
Canonical is a business. It needs money and if you've ever owned a business, or worked in a financial position in one, you know there's no such thing as "getting enough". If they don't make money, they'll die and the project might terminate. Take it or leave it.
That being said, I chose to leave it a while back, for very similar reasons (I moved to Debian which was familiar and more ... free). But I cannot say I'm surprised they do similar deals, and cannot stand by when people accuse them of ... not following some convenient definition that was never there to begin with.
I use the amazon search via DuckDuckGo all the time in Firefox. Granted, I still tell DDG explicitly to search Amazon (via !), but it is not a far step to simply returning it always.
Maybe adding something like the !-notation for special searches to unity would be the golden way.
If their goal was to provide something that novices could get comfortable with quickly, I think they did a good job. It fell down for me in making the transition easy for people comfortable with the old UI, but that's clearly an audience they didn't intend to address, so I'm willing to cut them some slack.
How I want it to work: I click on the icon and get taken to a page that shows whether I've donated. If I do, I say how long the donation is for. (E.g., I choose $10 and 6 months.) My icon goes green across all my machines and I feel smug. In 6 months, it looks sickly, so I click on it and donate again.
Who searches their programs and wants to see matching books and music? I could understand listing other software for sale, but this is daft.
I doubt they'll get anything but complaints about this and it'll go away.
The default for me is a combined pane that shows recent apps, recent files and downloads. If I start typing a search term, whichever categories has matches show up.
If I want a specific category, such as just applications, I can select that.
Maybe they'll change the defaults, or ask question during install, but I suspect most of the people who might care will easily figure out how to remove/disable it.
(Frankly Unity is the most productive UI I've had since my Amiga days. I was planning on installing a tiling WM before I tried it, but then I ended up staying with Unity because it was such a smooth experience, even with far less tweaking than what I'm used to have to do.
My most frequently used apps are all just one key combination away. Everything else one key + search. I run most stuff full screen, but with the global menu enabled in most apps, most apps waste very little space even when I "just" have them fill all the available space. It's the closest approximation Amiga-style screens using workspaces I've experienced on Linux.
The only thing I hate is the loss of spatial file browsing)
I demonstrated that dpkg will not remove packages with dependencies. Furthermore some packages are so crucial (ie: essential) that dpkg does not even bother checking dependencies before erroring out.
How does that not change your point?
I'm not being snarky, I'm generally interested in learning more about Debian and it seems that you might be able to improve my knowledge.
The only time I've been forced to use dpkg in the past ten years was when the system was seriously messed up e.g. in the middle of a failed upgrade.
Did you read anything I wrote? I specifically mentioned that dpkg would not remove an essential package...twice:
In my initial reply I demonstrated that dpkg would not remove an essential package:
And in my second reply I simply restated what my example had demonstrated:"Furthermore some packages are so crucial (ie: essential) that dpkg does not even bother checking dependencies before erroring out."
> "The only time I've been forced to use dpkg in the past ten years was when the system was seriously messed up e.g. in the middle of a failed upgrade."
Just because the only time you had to use dpkg was when your system was messed up does not mean that dpkg is likely to mess up your system. Its like saying that the emergency room causes life threatening trauma because the only time I was seriously injured I had to go to the emergency room.
Does anyone know if there a name for this kind of fallacious reasoning? It seems like an amalgamation of "post hoc ergo propter hoc" and "cum hoc ergo propter hoc."
The OP is, I believe, trying to argue that apt-get is in general less likely to blow your foot off, therefore you should default to using apt-get in general since it makes you less likely to lose a foot in the long run.
If you prefer to memorise specific safe cases for brevity of typing, that's absolutely fine. The OP, I think, prefers not to do so, and the same goes for me.
Assuming I'm correct in describing the OP's argument, hopefully you can now both go "oh, okay, that's what he meant" and move on :)
When removing packages it just doesn't matter. When installing, it also doesn't really matter. dpkg can't fetch packages from the repositories, but it will mark them and a following apt-get install -f will fetch them flawlessly.
A few years ago you had to be careful when mixing apt-get and aptitude, and thus probably also when mixing aptitude with dpkg, as far as i know that is not the case anymore. Even a following autoremove should work.
You haven't mentioned one single valid cause why it should be wrong to use dpkg, and I'm pretty confident that you won't, because afaik it isn't. And i'm pretty sure.
(Just jumping in because dfc mentioning he really wants to know. Just think about apt-get as a frontend for dpkg which calls dpkg to install and remove .debs, but also fetches them from the internet and notices when they are no longer needed because they were installed as a dependency for a now removed package.)
> the point of apt-get being better than dpkg for this still stands.
alias canhaz='sudo apt-get install'
alias donotwant='sudo apt-get remove'
sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop
The typical Ubuntu user probably won't miss much on Xubuntu. When they find that mrxvt doesn't let them use Ctrl-C/V to copy and paste, they'll be mystified. Ditto for Openbox's wu wei panel management.
I use tint2 as a "panel" of sorts in Openbox, and modify menu.xml for anything else I need. I like it well enough. Also, modifying rc.xml allows one to set hotkeys.
sudo flay the-marketroid-who-came-up-with-that -v -v -painful -transcript -violate-human-rights
right now.
My guess is because they know if they make it too easy to turn off, and the ads aren't actually improving their users' lives (ads for books when you search for apps?! Might make sense for technical books I guess...) everyone will just turn off the ads.
Making it this hard to turn off a new feature because you don't trust it will help the users... must be heartbreaking to sell out your users like that.
I can't find any hints on ubuntu.com on how to donate (though they have a shop, I don't want any "swag").
Shuttleworth has always said he wants to make it a viable business; perhaps he's worried people would donate instead of having their business buy support (or whatever). Hrm.
EDIT: I searched their site and found the donate page. It doesn't seem to be linked from anywhere; only discoverable by using search.
http://www.ubuntu.com/community/get-involved/donate
http://www.debian.org/donations
http://packages.debian.org/search?suite=squeeze&searchon...
If you want up-to-date, use testing, which is at python 2.7.3:
http://packages.debian.org/search?suite=wheezy&searchon=...
They both have python3 versions available, too (3.1.3 and 3.2.3 respectively). There are legitimate complaints about Debian, but being stuck on python 2.4 is not one of them.
Mint used to set Firefox's default search engine a customized (read: craptastic) version of Google that's designed to rake in the ad revenue. I wouldn't have a problem with it if it wasn't utterly useless and ugly as sin. (It looked like the Google site search for webmasters.)
Now the default search engine is DuckDuckGo. I have no idea if they have a revshare agreement with them.
Are you referring to the default home page?
Ubuntu server is still excellent.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
> You can charge nothing, a penny, a dollar, or a billion dollars.
Ubuntu's full of non-free software and binary blobs. This is why it pretty much works out of the box. There's little fucking around with drivers, non-free codecs, etc.
In any event, adding non-free "premium" features doesn't make the operating system itself any less free.
I would pay if I were still an Ubuntu user. The only reason I don't use stock Ubuntu now is because of Unity.
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/09/online-shopping-features-...
>For example, when you want to search for “dishwashers” on Amazon you can just enter “Dishwashers” in the Dash and a small line of “suggested items” from Amazon will appear.
>The same happens when you search for a local file or app from the Home Lens.
>So yes, you can expect to see self-help guides on compassion when trying to launch Empathy.
>‘More Suggestions’ is a strange turn of phrase; most people don’t tend to expect product suggestions when looking for their e-mail app. But I can cede that it’s a far better name than that used in development: ‘treat yourself’
Showing ads when you search locally seems a tad much and a waste of system resources. Isn't this equivalent to showing shopping ads based on keyword searches in Spotlight and the Windows Start menu?
Edit: Just realized that I sometimes type keywords to find local files matching filenames and content that's personal in nature. Does this mean all those keywords are sent to Amazon and perhaps data mined to show personalized results?
You can add them to the home dash as well (or whatever their terminology is) which would send your normal search keystrokes, but that hasn't been the default for any other net based queries in the past.
Exactly my concern as well. It honestly seems like an awfully broad spray to have these results on every search – why not just make it a selectable mode instead of populating every time?
Not to mention rather obvious privacy issues.
That would have been fine for me if Amazon din't make it really obvious. Every damn time I search for something while signed in I am sure to receive an email from them the very next day suggesting similar items. It was even wierder when I watched a documentary about sex on xbox's amazon video and the next day I received an email talking about my "interest". So now I have to do all my lookups in incognito mode and will only sign in when I am ready to make the purchase.