Ubuntu Will Now Have Amazon Ads Pre-Installed 646
An anonymous reader writes "Scheduled to be released next month, Ubuntu 12.10 now includes both Amazon ads in the user's dash and by default an Amazon store in the user's launcher. The reason for these 'features'? Affiliate revenue. Despite previous controversies with Banshee and Yahoo, Canonical is 'confident it will be an interesting and useful feature for our 12.10 users.' But are the 'users' becoming products?"
Update: 09/22 19:35 GMT by T : Reader bkerensa scoffs, calling the Amazon integration unobtrusive, and says objections to its inclusion in the OS should be ignored, "because in reality ads will not be found in 12.10 unless you are seeing them on a third party website you go to in a web browser." He's got screenshots.
So long (Score:1, Informative)
and thanks for all the fish.
Easily disabled (Score:5, Informative)
I too am offended to be getting advertisements by default. But thankfully, they are trivial to remove. FTFA,
Removing Shopping Results from Unity
Much like the Amazon and Ubuntu One Music web-apps you can disable the âShoppingâ(TM) feature easily.
Just open up a terminal and run:
sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping
Re:Free with every Amazon order (Score:5, Informative)
while posting on ad-supported Slashdot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adblockplus [wikipedia.org]
Re:I see (Score:5, Informative)
They may have fixed it, but my experience was so terrifying (in 11.04 or 11.10, I forgot, when it was first introduced) I'm not going to try the latest version. Here my key complaints:
- everything runs full-screen. That sucks. No drag and drop between windows, without first un-maximising them.
- after you close an application in a not-maximised window, it will relaunch maximised. I un-maximised it not just because!
- the above works when the not maximised window is - the "start" menu sucks. A few "favourite" applications, the rest you have to search for. A HUGE screen area taken for each application; scrolling galore as I don't have a 25" monitor. Or you have to start typing the name of the application to narrow down your search. Big suck. A well arranged menu searches quicker, takes little space, and no need to remove my hand from the mouse.
- crtl-tab window switching did not work. I had to dig deep first online then on my machine to get that basic switcher working. It took me seconds from installing Unity to find that out, all in all about half an hour (!) to fix that. And it still didn't work really well. Now that was a total show-stopper, if I had never before tried Ubuntu I'd have dropped it there and then, and not bothered to find out how to get it working.
Then in the process I found out that there is a "Gnome Classic" too, switched to that, and didn't look back. When upgrading Ubuntu I'm just selecting Gnome Classic and not even trying anything else. It's just that in 12.04 Gnome Classic sucks too, just not sucky enough to go through downloading and installing a whole new distro which sucks too. I'm first and foremost a user of my computer, after all!
Re:Easily disabled (Score:5, Informative)
You forgot the other lenses and scopes, which also bring up external search results. So instead, open a terminal window and type:
% sudo dpkg --list |grep "lens" | awk '{print $2}' | xargs sudo apt-get remove
% sudo dpkg --list |grep "scope" | awk '{print $2}' | xargs sudo apt-get remove
See? Easy as pie. Absolutely anybody ought to be able to do this. Ubuntu is not like Windows where users are assumed to be incompetent morons. On Ubuntu, every user is smart, skilled, and infinitely patient. It's paradise, really.
Re:Is it only in Unity? (Score:5, Informative)
The GPL does not forbid you from (a) selling your software, or (b) making a profit from it. The GPL requires you to release the source code for your product. For example, selling your GPL game with protected assets (art, music, etc.) but open code is fine. Also, RedHat and others make money from supporting their distros/software.
Re:I see (Score:4, Informative)
- everything runs full-screen. That sucks. No drag and drop between windows, without first un-maximising them.
Uhm, no it doesn't, and checking back to 11.04 it didn't even then.
- after you close an application in a not-maximised window, it will relaunch maximised. I un-maximised it not just because!
No it doesn't, and it didn't in 11.04
- the above works when the not maximised window is - the "start" menu sucks. A few "favourite" applications, the rest you have to search for. A HUGE screen area taken for each application; scrolling galore as I don't have a 25" monitor. Or you have to start typing the name of the application to narrow down your search. Big suck. A well arranged menu searches quicker, takes little space, and no need to remove my hand from the mouse.
I must admit in "old-fashioned" UIs like Gnome 2 I mostly start with alt-f2 and begin typing the name of the thing I want to run. That still works in Unity, although it works better if you just hit the <meta> key.
- crtl-tab window switching did not work. I had to dig deep first online then on my machine to get that basic switcher working
I don't think <ctrl-tab> ever switched windows - in Firefox it switches tabs though. Maybe you're thinking of <alt-tab> which switches windows but was admittedly buggy as all hell in 11.04? It works pretty well in 12.04 though.
Did you try GNOME Classic? (Score:3, Informative)
This article is FUD (Score:1, Informative)
Re:I see (Score:5, Informative)
A couple of notes concerning Mate, Cinnamon, Xfce, and KDE 4. Note that I'm writing this from a "Debian point of view" rather than it being Ubuntu-specific, simply because I don't run Ubuntu (for a bunch of reasons).
We might migrate to Mate or Cinnamon or similar after they settle down a little. I'll also reassess Gnome 3 after another couple of minor versions, in case it actually improves enough to be tolerable. Otherwise, we'll either stay with xfce or move to KDE.
I've recently tried Mate and Cinnamon, and they have a common problem: they don't seem to respect the "Debian menu". i.e. there are normal menu items that don't show up and instead you get the menu that Mate or Cinnamon wants to show you. My experience (in testing Ubuntu-based distros in VMs) is that Mate works in 2D, but Cinnamon is 3D-only, so it sucks to run Cinnamon in a VM. Mate hasn't been accepted into Debian, so it's not even an option for me to run right now. There are DDs that don't want it to be included, partly because it (supposedly) depends on old Gnome 2 libs, and partly because they'd rather see more effort put into Gnome 3 (which I cannot stand using). Cinnamon isn't in Debian either, probably for similar reasons. I've looked at both the Mate and Cinnamon packages available in the upstream repositories and both seemed to need work and didn't appear to be stable yet, and installing them via the external repositories looked troublesome.
Xfce is great, and what I generally recommend today, especially on low-end systems. Users I've given it to seem to like it too. The only thing I don't like (which is not really a problem with Xfce itself) is that Debian has changed the default network manager used for the Xfce task from wicd to network-manager, but this is is fixable because the package is a Recommends rather than Depends, so this is a minor complaint. I think the reason for the default change is that network-manager is IPv6 enabled where wicd is not. I've had several problems with network-manager that I don't have with wicd though, which is why I stick with wicd.
KDE 4 is good, but only if you turn off Nepomuk and Strigi file indexing, otherwise it runs terribly. [I'm primarily a KDE 4 user and love it otherwise.] These settings are in K->Settings->System Settings within Workspace Appearance and Behavior -> Destkop Search. It isn't easy to figure out what you'll be giving up by turning these features off, but thankfully someone has come up with a web page and document that explains these features. https://kdenepomukmanual.wordpress.com/2012/02/06/detailed-kde-nepomuk-manual/ [wordpress.com] One additional interesting thing to note about KDE 4 is that it can do compositing (or not, your choice, easily switchable via Alt+Shift+F12) without using compiz -- instead it's built-in. KDE 4 also has several rendering engines for both raster and OpenGL, so it works on both 2D-only and 3D enabled systems.
As for Unity -- no. 3D only so it sucks to run in a VM, and it interferes too much with how I work. Also I'm told that Unity is an add-on to compiz, and that systems that run for days get slower over time and eventually compiz crashes requiring a restart of X.