Canonical displays advertisements in the Ubuntu terminal, and users are annoyed

Advertising in the Ubuntu terminal

In the early 10s, Ubuntu was the best choice for Linux users. It didn't have the prettiest desktop, but it was a rock, lightweight, and customizable. It was in October 2010 that they moved to Unity, and many of us watched as our discreet teams began to “creep out”. It was a controversial move that they undid in Ubuntu 18.04, returning to GNOME, but the controversy and bad feelings have only gotten worse in recent years.

Last April, coinciding with the jammy jellyfish release, Canonical forced all official flavors to use Firefox as a snap package. It's something he did years before with Chromium, but the Mozilla browser thing was more painful. Another decision that the most veterans did not like was to use their own software store that gives priority to snap packages, and is also not compatible with flatpaks. The last thing was to add advertising that can be seen in the terminal.

Advertising for Ubuntu Pro

The advertising that can be seen is the one you have in the header capture. He invites us to test the beta of Ubuntu Pro, which is described on the table:

Ubuntu Pro, the expanded subscription for security and compliance maintenance, is now offered in public beta for data centers and workstations. Canonical will offer a free tier for personal and small-scale commercial use, in line with the company's community commitment and mission to make open source more easily consumed by all.

Basically, it's expanded support for LTS versions; we do not see this advertising in the Just Launched Ubuntu 22.10. What Canonical has come up with is to add those lines when executing some commands in the terminal, like sudo apt upgrade. In addition, it is something that has been appearing for a few days, and only when the “ubuntu-advantajes” package is updated, which, in fact, has caused an Ubuntu virtual machine to crash where I wanted to test. The package can be removed, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it.

Enough to switch to another distro?

Me personally it would not seem right to me abandon a distribution that works for me because of a message like this, but the truth is that there are users who are saying "that's it." It is likely that the message alone will not be enough to switch to another distribution, but looking back, Chromium, snap store, Firefox, some hasty changes that caused applications to close... We have been reading for some time in the Linux blogosphere that X operating system is "the best Ubuntu you can have", X often being Linux Mint.

In the end, the truth is that Canonical is playing with fire and taking advantage of the fame it created years ago. Better not do what the second part of the saying says, because if he goes to sleep... higher towers have fallen. Many join Canonical with Microsoft in the same sentence, and we already know that M$ is not a very well-regarded company in a community that prefers freedom. We'll see what happens in the future, but I'm already looking forward to the next episode of this series.


8 comments, leave yours

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  1.   Rino said

    It is a pity that the best operating system is falling. I now prefer Fedora, it is more stable and does not make changes that harm us

    1.    Taylor said

      “He does not make changes that harm us”
      Sure, sure, Fedora isn't Red Hat's test bench, and whales fly, right?

      Enjoy being Red Hat's beta tester and for free, your shareholders will thank you a lot for helping them in their business in the best way... FOR FREE!

      xd

  2.   employee said

    I've been getting that for a long time when I update the repo, but I don't pay attention to it hehe. Personally, it doesn't bother me.

  3.   Juan said

    in my opinion advertising is when a third party company pays you to put an ad for a product.

    Advertising is also when the same company publishes information in its own media so that you buy another of their products.

    but it is that in this case it is not possible to speak of advertising since what canonical is doing is informing its users that they can use Ubuntu pro for free.

    this is information not advertising

  4.   Taylor said

    My goodness… the world with so many problems, life gets more difficult every day and there are people who get annoyed by a simple line of text in the terminal, lol.

    1.    Elias Ezequiel DIpace said

      I think the same, I use linux mint, but from what you can see in the image, there are only 2 lines in the terminal, it really isn't annoying, it doesn't attract attention, it doesn't take your eyes off, and it doesn't touch your privacy, not even they make money directly from this. And even so, if they tell me that with those 2 lines I contribute monetarily to the distro I use, then add 5 lines of ads.

  5.   Diego German Gonzalez said

    I had been doing it in the server version for a long time with I don't remember what service

  6.   richo said

    advertising as such does not bother but the one that is intrusive and that has malware, in this case it does not apply, even as they say it seems more like a warning to its users and not an advertisement, besides it is good news to be able to try ubuntu pro for free! , and even so they get annoyed?, and in any case all web pages, even those of linux, have ads... if you have to live on something...