Canonical Launches Ubuntu Pro | Hacker News Reader

Canonical Launches Ubuntu Pro

ubuntu.com

71 pointsShowalkKama74 comments

This is new:

    $ sudo apt upgrade
    Reading package lists... Done
    Building dependency tree
    Reading state information... Done
    Calculating upgrade... Done
    Try Ubuntu Pro beta with a free personal subscription on up to 5 machines.
    Learn more at https://ubuntu.com/pro
    0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded
    $

This removes the spam and hopefully prevents this issue from showing up again:

    sudo ln -s /dev/null /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20apt-esm-hook.conf

Can't wait for these ads to show up in the cron emails from my automated upgrade scripts. I know apt doesn't have a stable console output but I shouldn't need to defend against ads in the output.

Yep, this pretty much ends Ubuntu for me. It was a good run, 8.04 was a historic release, but it has definitely gone off the rails now.

I call bullshit. Fourteen umyears of using Ubuntu, through security issues, Amazon ads, Unity and back to Gnome, and so on. But an ad for a pro service in the motd does it?

> But an ad for a pro service in the motd does it?

Nit: The motd has had ad's for a long time. This is about ad's in apt's output.

apt is a new program that has human-readable output with suggestions meant for human consumption. apt-get still exists and behaves exactly as always.

I wasn't making any value judgement on the situation, just nitpicking GP's comment for accuracy.

I will probably not use Ubuntu for any personal stuff after this, but I already wasn't.

>through security issues

I did not really care back then, even happy as a teenager that I was able to use a root exploit to get root on our high school's computers. It's something that you become curious about in your 20s

>Amazon ads It was literally just an Unity bar icon and search results.

>Unity

Was awesome. Definitely not as good as GNOME 2 with the Human murrine theme but the keyboard shortcuts and the search made it a pleasure to work with

>But an ad for a pro service in the motd does it?

It's not just that. These things creep up slowly, companies start testing waters and then things progress. Look at Windows, soon you will have to pay a subscription to use it, you will own nothing.

Why would you deal with any of that when there’s Debian?

Better closed source support when needed, and ZFS out of the box. It's been a while since I compared though, I'm only using prox ox (debian) for a vm server and fedora for laptop.

Thankfully there are always forks available for those that won't pay for the work of others.

When in the end only commercial Linux distributions get the goodies, don't be sad.

We always had the goodies, developed by the open source community. GIMP is easier to my hand than Photoshop in a lot of uses. The encroaching of the subscription model into Linux is not something acceptable to me though.

That line didn't work for me. This did though:

  sudo rm /var/lib/ubuntu-advantage/messages/*.tmpl

`sudo systemctl mask motd-news.timer`

For all I disagree with canonical's desktop decisions their long term support of their distro is currently unmatched. You can't get 10 years anywhere else.

Canonical's (free!) Extended Service Maintainance (ESM) program has been extremely valuable to me for the last decade. They still support security updates on Ubuntu 14.04 (April 2014) till 2024. Hopefully this rebranding of parts of ESM won't change that support.

> You can't get 10 years anywhere else.

That's been Red Hat's thing since forever. And Rocky is free.

They'll hire all Rocky contributors in under 3 years and turn it into a rolling distribution.

That's how Redhat works.

That's besides the point and probably not accurate anyways.

First, my original point is that Ubuntu is only just breaking into the territory already firmly dominated by Red hat. The presence or absence of a free edition of EL doesn't really change that.

Second, that's not really how Red Hat works either; even CentOS lasted for longer than 3 years.

Finally, even if that was how Red Hat worked, that doesn't mean it's how Rocky works. I'm skeptical that a community operated project is going to come to the exact conditions that led to it being created in the first place. And honestly, even if they somehow did, there's like three other projects all doing free respins of RHEL.

Want to bet? Literally, I mean. I'll bet you $100 that they will not hire all Rocky contributors in under 3 years and turn it into a rolling distribution.

Good luck leeching Red Hat distributions, apparently no one learned with CentOS.

You can't get ten years from Canonical, either. I've been burned by drivers being dropped from LTS support mid-cycle. Sure, they were obscure drivers, probably with few users. I'm not saying the decision didn't make business sense. But I'll never rely on an Ubuntu LTS again.

Free, for personal use only.

Yes. I am a human person. I care about human person things. Corporate persons can pay.

Why should any company buy this? Does that mean, that these security updates are exclusive to Ubuntu Pro and everybody else won't get Vulnerabilities fixed?

Aren't security upgrades anyway getting deployed - I mean, if Canonical would hold bug fixes for Vulnerabilities back, then obviously the community would switch to a different Linux Distro?

Especially this sentence makes me wondering: "Many zero-day vulnerabilities addressed under embargo, with critical CVEs patched in less than 24h on average"

=> This sounds like Canonical holds back zero-day vulnerabilities for not-paying users!

From TFA:

> Ubuntu Pro expands security coverage for critical, high and medium Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) to thousands of applications and toolchains, including Ansible, Apache Tomcat, Apache Zookeeper, Docker, Drupal, Nagios, Node.js, phpMyAdmin, Puppet, PowerDNS, Python 2, Redis, Rust, WordPress, and more.

So sounds like coverage of a bunch of stuff in their Universe repository that is not part of the base system.

Though I found my own thing to whinge about, on https://ubuntu.com/security:

> Ubuntu [...] includes access to:

> - ...

> - Knowledge Base: a private archive of expert-written articles and tutorials

Wait what?

> > - Knowledge Base: a private archive

Common thing for enterprise customers, I can not speak for Ubuntu but usually they are private because they are filled with bad articles and tutorials that no one would pay for. Sounds good though.

Ubuntu LTS is only 5 years, and only for the core (the server stuff really, the 'main' and 'restricted' repos). Desktop and other 'universe' stuff has a shorter time frame.

After 5 years, companies wanting to keep running older versions of the OS require 3rd party security updates at a minimum for compliance issues, even if they think they can protect themselves and their customers without it. This was Ubuntu Advantage and Extended Security Maintenance (ESM). And now it seems Ubuntu Pro. UA lots of people got for free, either due to only needing a few seats or it being included with their cloud. But bigger shops with their own hardware would need to pay, or get to explain to the media why they didn't bother if they get breached.

Souns like it's security updates for otherwise out of support versions, 16.04, like MS sells (sold?) for Windows XP.

Hopefully it just means extended duration for getting patches. If not… yikes.

I'm personally still upset that they made all the ubuntu-advantage software a) come preinstalled b) making it impossible to uninstall because it's a dependency of ubuntu-minimal[1]

[1]: https://packages.ubuntu.com/bionic/ubuntu-minimal

wow just had a daily apt-get update/upgrade and got a Pro ad in the terminal, pretty crazy https://files.catbox.moe/bzqkry.png

That is not cool and should be the headline. Maybe it's time to start looking for another distro if Ubuntu's time is coming to an end.

Funny people are willing to leave with just 1 text banner which you can turn off.

Ubuntu is providing so much value on the server end, having predictable LTS release, quite up to date packages, easy to use zfs and solid experience, it seems people's use cases are for hobby only which has many alternatives.

> Funny people are willing to leave with just 1 text banner which you can turn off.

I'm not interested in using ad-supported versions of products, period. Especially for work. I don't care what their other redeeming qualities are. Even just dipping their toe into the freemium/nagware world signals to me that they're moving away from shipping a professional grade product (ironic given that's what they're advertising).

I don't buy into "what's the big deal" type arguments like the parent post. Same as I'd cancel netflix even if they just showed a 2 second ad before a movie. I want to be a customer, not a vehicle for advertising. The fact that this is an open source software project makes me even more sensitive to it, because I don't want to see OSS become some sort of scam that teases what companies really want to sell you.

> I want to be a customer

Bet you're not the type to pay for a product.

It's easy to say you want to move on with 1 tiny annoyance, but when you start providing services to people, you'd realize you need to make a life out of it.

You also seem to have a very wrong sense of open source definition that they must be free and ad free, but that's just in your free riding mind.

Wow, why are you fighting angrily with strangers about this? "My free riding mind?" So we disagree about advertising, no reason to be so angry

I left Ubuntu when they started pushing snaps. Linux Mint and Debian are much better.

I don’t understand snaps. They really make me only want to run Debian.

The benefit of snaps is that developers only need to produce one file which will work on all Linux distros, but that means it doesn't integrate properly with any Linux distro. Flatpaks seem better than snaps but I don't like them either.

I personally chose Fedora Silverblue (that has been amazing!) after after all those snaps.

I've never had an easier and more seamless time upgrading across major versions, and that includes my previous experience with Ubuntu, Arch, Mac, Android, Windows and Debian.

Luckily for me, I was already into podman and flatpak on Ubuntu, so swiching wasn't hard beyond forgetting that I can't do apt anymore every once in a while.

Debian would have been my choice bad silverblue not worked worked for me.

Arch doesn't have "major versions".

My experience back then (10~12 years ago) with Arch was issues upgrading in general, granted I was using it wrong, but in one instance I remember the networking daemon got upgraded, but there was no uodates for something core that depended on it which lead to a non-functioning network until I managed to copy files over USB and revert.

And I left Debian when they started pushing systemd.

Currently a happy user of Devuan.

But just keep pushing. And I'll keep moving.

This and /etc/motd are really the only communication channel Canonical has with some of their users. If nothing else, they need to use them to inform people when they are out of support. It would be unethical to not do that when they could. Actually telling people what to do about it, ideally before the deadlines pass, even better.

This is still a horrible communication medium. If you’re an enterprise you’ll have someone managing this contract and will know months prior and renew. You also shouldn’t be SSHing to production hosts so the only people that will see these adverts are hobbyists and those creating images.

It is horrible. It is also the last resort. I guess we will never know how many hobbyists or tiny businesses it actually helps, unless Canonical adds a tracking id to the links.

Will this cause a significant shift away from Ubuntu?

In the startup world, much less so in the enterprise world, I hear a lot of "We dont use Windows because it is too expensive and we dont wish to spend the money on licenses".

(There are also many people who are just ideologically opposed to Windows)

I hear the same thing when it comes to RDBMS and other vital software, Oracle, Microsoft are too expensive to license. Having worked in both the business Enterprise world,

"We dont use any software if we cant license support and .. "

with startups

"We dont use any software that is not free and open source" Aside from the fact that they are developing the next unicorn SaaS that they will charge $$$$ for.

It might mean more adoption on the Enterprise side, though RedHat or one already provides this.

I would think it could cause a shit in the startup crowd unless they figure Ubuntu will be available for free as well so they dont want ot worry about license costs

Apparently they also launched pretty horrible cookie popup dark patterns. Come on Canonical, even Google learned to do it properly by now.

what cookie popup dark pattern are you referring to? I didn't see any popups.

These are the popups (I clicked the "manage" button) I'm seeing when clicking this link:

https://files.catbox.moe/wbfkk0.png

https://files.catbox.moe/ckx2k7.png

I think there was already some kind of GDPR court case that forced Google to make a one-click opt-out button because adding extra steps for opting out is not acceptable, but Canonical isn't exactly a privacy-consciour company so I guess they'll wait for one of the overworked DPAs to act.

Ah I guess consent-o-matic must have blocked those. almost forgot I had that extension installed.

Sadly not for me, I have Consent-o-matic installed and still got the "turn on all trackers! (or the minimum)" modal.

Linux Mint have been maintaining a Debian version for just those kind of reason. One misstep from Cannonocal and Mint is already and seamlessly available on Debian for all eternity. https://linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php

At that point why not just use Debian instead?

It's just very smooth how the user experience unfolds to you as a user. But you have a point!

The five free machines remind me of Portainer. For personal dev machines, I would actually prefer Arch over Ubuntu. I wonder how long people would switch off Ubuntu because of these; now, I hope the sooner, the better.

So Debian?

I'm using Linux Mint Debian Edition 5, and recommend it. It has the deep sensibility of Linux Mint, but it's _not_ based off Ubuntu. The Cinnamon desktop in LMDE5 has much more polish than Debian 11's Cinnamon desktop, which I also tried and hated within 2 hours (the user management - namely adding additional users who don't inherit the group memberships they sensibly should - is hot garbage).

LMDE is pretty good, but you have to like Cinnamon.

I gave it an extended test this year. 6 months or more. I can't get on with it.

Allegedly there's a new Debian remix coming from the originator of Ubuntu Mate. That sounds promising. The snag is, I don't like Mate much, either. Its vertical taskbars are non-functional rubbish.

The best I've seen recently is MX Linux, the original Xfce edition.

It does feel like every year or two Ubuntu does something that annoys a large lump of its user base, who proceed to express an interest in moving to something more ethical / predictable, but also seem to be unaware of Debian. It's a bit bewildering.

I don't think Debian has the resources to do 10 year support, even if they can make use of the patches Canonical will be providing.

No, if you are going to switch, use Devuan.

I don't understand why they don't make the default Ubuntu theme a bit nicer. It seems that they would merely have to hire a single designer to improve this materially.

I actually think it looks really good, certainly by Linux standards at least

Agreed. I find GNOME to be unusable junk from the functionality POV.

(I'll probably get challenged on this, so here's a shopping list:

• Give me back a componentised desktop, the O.M. in G.N.O.M.E.

• If I must have a top panel, make it useful. I want menus in there, and as many status icons as I wish, which is lots.

• I want 100% keyboard control. I want to unplug my mouse and have it totally usable, everything, no exceptions.

• And while we are at that, I want total 100% screen reader compatibility for my blind friends. That means TEXT. I want text menus, not hidden, right there. I want clear descriptions, everywhere, not jargon BS like "Activities".

• I want it accessible for me and everyone.)

... but GNOME looks beautiful. Ubuntu just makes it better.

KDE is functional, not very but just barely enough, but it's fugly.

But this is cosmetic stuff. That's always been a critical weakness of Linux, sadly.

So I ignore it, and on everything except Ubuntu, I use Xfce. Doesn't look pretty, but it works, and works well.

So raspbian

I've only tried Raspbian on PC.

It's just tweaked LXDE. Not bad; bit basic. Not as flexible as Xfce. In general a poor copy of Windows 95, like virtually all Linux desktops.

As I wrote here: https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/17/linux_desktop_feature...

I would pay for this.

If they could get rid of the slow LibreOffice garbage and make the audio / video system more stable, I'd pay a monthly fee.

I would pay for Firefox too.

What is it you think could be improved ?

The purple / orange theme is gross looking and clashes with neutral colors from third parties. It just looks extremely unprofessional. They should just ship vanilla GNOME, it’s beautiful.

Beauty is very much in the eye of the beholder.

A good read on this theme is Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance.

I'm not a designer so it is difficult to point out exactly how it should be improved. My reaction to it however is it has a very amateur look in my opinion. I've typically installed Gnome extensions to make it look better (though I think the one I've been using is probably going a little too far for most users).

what’s not nice about it specifically

Still an emmental...

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