Ubuntu 16.04 beta – no more auto data-spaffing

Discussion in 'all things UNIX' started by TheWindBringeth, Mar 29, 2016.

  1. TheWindBringeth

    TheWindBringeth Registered Member

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    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/29/ubuntu_16_04_first_beta_review/
     
  2. Daveski17

    Daveski17 Registered Member

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    Although I think the "spyware" as an opt-in would originally have been a lot less controversial, this will do little to placate the detractors of Ubuntu (& Canonical) in general. I understand the rationale behind the original decision:

    ‘Canonical also reckoned the marriage of your desktop returns with product information from the Amazon warehouse would generate money from Amazon affiliates that could be used to support the development of Ubuntu Linux.’ ~ op cit

    but I doubt Shuttleworth will convince the die hards who are convinced that it is FOSS magic fairies that contribute to operating system development costs and expenditure, rather than a more pragmatic business model.

    It would be interesting to see the movable Unity launcher, as that was intended from the start, I believe. It's also good to see the Chinese version of Ubuntu progressing.
     
  3. oliverjia

    oliverjia Registered Member

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    IMO, Ubuntu was not too bad at all in privacy setups, even in the 14.04 version with online search turned on by default. You can simply turn it off by using Unity Teak tool.

    The popularity of Linux has certainly increased worldwide because of the efforts made by Shuttleworth with Ubuntu (and Mint derivatized from it). It has better hardware support on my computers than Windows 7/8 does. Canonical, as a business, needs to make money, I have no problems with that, as long as they don't plant some backdoors to spy on you.

    Privacy wise, look at Windows 10, lol. There is no way to escape.
     
  4. mirimir

    mirimir Registered Member

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    Escape is possible. One must stay awake, however ;)
     
  5. vasa1

    vasa1 Registered Member

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  6. Daveski17

    Daveski17 Registered Member

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  7. Daveski17

    Daveski17 Registered Member

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    Or just set this to 'off'. ;)

    lens1.jpg
     
  8. MisterB

    MisterB Registered Member

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    Removing geoclue, zeitgeist and some of the more intrusive unity lens components will thoroughly purge Ubuntu 14.04 of the "spyware" and slightly increase performance without breaking Unity in any way.

    In any case, it will be nice to have a new LTS version of Ubuntu to play with. Unlike some people, I actually like Unity a lot. It is fast, uncomplicated, and uncluttered. It leaves a nice space to run VMs the way it is layed out.
     
  9. Daveski17

    Daveski17 Registered Member

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    Yeah, I like Unity as well. It was the reason I bought my Lenovo with Trusty. It's a vast improvement on Gnome IMO.
     
  10. Amanda

    Amanda Registered Member

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    I remember seeing that some users broke Unity because they removed geoclue and Co.. But remember that you can create dummy packages with those names, and this won't break Unity.

    Create dummy packages for geoclue, zeitgeist, libqtlocation, qt5-location, etc, and set their version as 999, this way you'll never need to upgrade them ;)

    Anyway, kudos to Canonical for removing the spyware :thumb: I love Ubuntu, and that is just one more reason to recommend it.
     
  11. MisterB

    MisterB Registered Member

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    It's just matter of getting the right packages removed. Apt-get remove without wild cards did it right. Adding wild cards removed too much.
     
  12. Kerodo

    Kerodo Registered Member

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  13. Amanda

    Amanda Registered Member

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    It's interesting that, to me, removing geoclue, geoclue2, zeitgeist, gnome-online-accounts, gnome-miners, etc, even on Debian, asked to remove my entire MATE+XFCE :argh:

    But something do seem less entangled on Ubuntu.
     
  14. Amanda

    Amanda Registered Member

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  15. Kerodo

    Kerodo Registered Member

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    Yeah... I'm not quite sure what to think of it. I'm running Ubuntu now and liking it just fine by itself... I've pretty much sworn off of Win 10. Interesting, though.
     
  16. oliverjia

    oliverjia Registered Member

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    It's not the whole Ubuntu desktop OS that will be on the crappy Win10 OS. Instead, it's only the few modules that are corresponding to Linux programming, such as bash and Linux command line.
    For me, I currently use Ubuntu 14.04.4 AMD64 as my main desktop OS, with a Windows 10 x86 guest OS running without networking in a VirtualBox VM when necessary (to use MS Office, Adobe Acrobat etc). The file sharing between Ubuntu host and Windows 10 guest is done via VirtualBox "share folder" feature. A perfect setup. There is no way Microsoft could collect my privacy data with the network card in the VM disabled, lol.
     
  17. Kerodo

    Kerodo Registered Member

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    Yeah, that's the impression I got too. I'm probably showing my ignorance here, but I don't understand of what use that would be to anyone? If someone is running Win 10, why would they want or need those modules? Just for linux programming? Why would anyone want to do linux programming in a Windows environment?
     
    Last edited: Mar 30, 2016
  18. oliverjia

    oliverjia Registered Member

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    I think you are asking a very good question. I am not sure either, but I am guessing maybe it has something to do with Microsoft Azure platform?
     
  19. Kerodo

    Kerodo Registered Member

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    Yeah, I suppose anything's possible. I'll have to learn more about Azure, I'm not too familiar with that either...
     
  20. Kerodo

    Kerodo Registered Member

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  21. vasa1

    vasa1 Registered Member

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