Hacker News Reader

Comment by chatman | Hacker News Reader

Good to know adoption of so many GNU/Linux desktops. Though, Ubuntu is a bad choice because of the Amazon search bar spyware enabled by default which sends back search queries to Amazon. Perhaps they don't understand the underlying principles behind free software: something that gives the users complete freedom.

View on HN

You do realize that the Amazon shopping lens is:

a) GPL software, with the source code readily available and

b) Easy to disable - a single switch in settings

c) Easy to remove altogether...

a) GPL code doesn't justify submitting user queries to Amazon without seeking explicit user permission b) It should be opt-in service, not an opt-out. By default, this should be switched off. c) That doesn't mean this feature isn't a spyware.

I imagine their custom version removed that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GendBuntu .

They most probably tweaked it to remove that kind of things. The French Gendarmerie as a pretty good IT department. They even developed a big security plugin for thunderbird called "milimail" (may be abandoned now).

Self-reply: Milimail is not dead, it got renamed Trustedbird.

Freedom is always freedom from something. In this case, the main attraction wasn't freedom from non-complete user freedom (indeed, the end users are likely to experience a rather un-free computing environment), it was freedom from commercial software vendors.

Fedora would have been a better choice.

SLACKWARE IS ALL YOU SHOULD EVER NEED YOU NARROW-MINDED EVANGELIST!!1

Funny how you say that, given that I've never seen Slack users display the type of attitude you described. Same goes for *BSD users.

Rather, most "Linux supremacists" or however you call them I've seen tend to be Arch users, and vigorously promote Arch. Many of them have never tried a flavor of BSD or any other UNIX (such as Plan 9) either and barely even mention it.

Disclaimer: I'm a Slackware user. Although I don't like Ubuntu, it's good to see institutions making the shift. Besides, they need an easy-to-use desktop distribution, they're obviously not going to expect their workers to have a terminal emulator open 24/7.

As a long-time Linux user on many distributions and a sometime BSD user: I find many of BSD's differences not particularly relevant, let alone endearing. It's just another platform. Although there is a street meme about BSD being real Unix or something, I don't see the point making it a badge of honor to use one rather than the other.

Sorry, I didn't want to imply Slackware users are loud-mouthed fanboys, or anything derogatory at all, for that matter. I have used Slackware myself for quite a long time and found the community to be quite wonderful.

I was just bashing Ubuntu's lack of purity with what seemed to be the most appropriate choice nowadays :-).

That's why 20 years later Linux and open source are still struggling to gain mainstream traction. Gnome vs KDE, 200 varieties of Linux, Open Office vs Libre Office, etc.

Most people don't care in the least. They just want a good acceptable solution where they can get help if they ever have a problem. Why would most people choose the mess of open source? Gimp vs Photoshop? Time is money.

The Open Source community is its own worst enemy.

Mainstream traction cannot be a justification for total domination of GNU/Linux by a company like Canonical that puts in spyware in Ubuntu (Amazon search).

Then make something better. Canonical is in this position because it does more things that are good for the end user than any other distro maker. Redhat's too busy trying to domineer the system through terribly written software like systemd to work on giving users a good experience, Arch is too centered around power users, and Slackware is similar. If you want people to not use Canonical's Linux offerings, then you need to provide something that will be supported for more than a year at a reasonable price, easy to use, and will reasonably Just Work. No other Linux distro has that at the moment, and it doesn't look like any will anytime soon.

That's debatable. Fedora is great, but it is not very stable and skews toward the power users (documentation for solving common problems has a tendency to exercise Linux power user skills, for example).

Fedora that stops supporting revisions after 13 months and doesn't have a long-term support option? That would be awful for an enterprise to roll out. It's a 'power user' distribution, not an 'office worker' one.

I take it you meant RHEL/CentOS?

Fedora is a rapidly changing distribution. RHEL/Clones have updates until 2020

Reply on news.ycombinator.com