Canonical Is Still Operating At A Significant Loss

[Vim_User]

Ubuntu Server is a great OS. And is much more important to cannonical and the world than their desktop. I think many users dont use the server or realize how much more important it is but thats got to be their main product.

I am curious, I never used Ubuntu Server, what are the advantages over using plain Debian?

[Anvil]

wont be long an Ubuntu will find themselves just like what happened to Mandriva now OpenMandriva . there are way to many Debian based Distro's to begin with

[dee.]

I could be wrong, but isn't spyware something you aren't aware of harvesting your data? If so, I'm sure Google and Canonical both have a user agreement thing you "have" to read before using the software, and agree to willingly upon that software's usage?

That's possibly a legal excuse, not a moral one. You see, there's a difference between consent and informed consent. Legally, if you put your name in a contract, it's binding (as long as it's legal). These days, 99.9% of people have been conditioned to skip all "terms and conditions" pages, because it's all mostly in legalese anyway and most people just want to get to their website/software/OS/porn as fast as they can.

Google obviously doesn't respect your privacy, their entire business model depends on datamining. You're not a customer to google - you're a source of income, a mine of data to be mined and sold to the highest bidder.

Canonical is going for the same business model by hawking out your data to Amazon etc. How informed is the average Ubuntu user about what happens to their data when they type it to the dash?

Especially now, with the NSA playing big brother to the entire world, we should all be more careful and aware of our privacy. Anything that can even potentially compromise your privacy must be opt-in, not opt-out.

Canonical could fix this easily. They could make the feature opt-in, and that'd shut up most complaints. They could add a dialog that shows up when you install and asks "do you want to enable this feature? here's the ups and downs of it", and it should honestly explain - in a clear and concise manner - the potential risks and implications of the feature. That's what they'd do if they were honest and upfront about it. Canonical doesn't do that, and despite all excuses from Shuttleworth, it's obviously because they want more people to have it enabled - they have a vested monetary interest in having people use the feature.

[philip550c]

I am curious, I never used Ubuntu Server, what are the advantages over using plain Debian?

We mainly use ubuntu server at work although we have some debian machines as well. Ubuntu server has most of what debian has but it is also has some great things that are not in debian. One advantage is that it is widely used and there is a lot of documentation especially in the forums. Im sure debian does too. We make use of canonical's MAAS system though for quick deployment and juju is nice as well. The openstack integration is a great addition. Im sure we could do everything in debian but having it ready to go in ubuntu speeds up our deploment time. As we dont use debian extensively Im not extremely qualified to point out the differences, my main point was that ubuntu server is a great product and better than the ubuntu desktop.

[Hunkah]

Canonical Pffft!

Canonical's Ubumtu is but a mere spec of a server OS. I wouldn't waste my time. The communities behind RHEL/CentOS/*SUSE and (gag) Oracle, are huge in comparison.

I agree that Ubumtu gets way too much credit for what they do. Shuttleworthless brags about taking all the innovation from the competition and not contributing back to the open community. He's a smug loser that probably got beat up in public school and now won't share his candy with anyone. I don't know what it is about pictures of his face, but I "wanna" smash it!

I laughed a lot in this thread... the "This site has moderators?" comment and the guy that signed in just to post hatred at Canonical was funny too. It is posts like these that make threads funny and worth reading. If you guys just were all facts and no bullshit, I would rather read a legal document.

Free speech and freedom of opinion. Otherwise we wouldn't be 'mer'cans!

[Vim_User]

Free speech and freedom of opinion. Otherwise we wouldn't be 'mer'cans!

Free speech only applies to your state, not to private forums like Phoronix. There is sentence in your constitution that says "Phoronix shall not make a law ...". Also, I am not an American.

[dee.]

Free speech and freedom of opinion. Otherwise we wouldn't be 'mer'cans!

[newwen]

Well, we'll see. Valve is doing exactly that. So let's see how fast can Valve get their SteamOS business in the positive.

Valve doesn't aim to make money from SteamOS. They're just trying to comoditize the gaming OS and console market, just like Google has done with android in the mobile space. Valve is following a much more open way than Google does with Android, though (more comparable to Chromium OS than Android). They just can't afford to let a single company monopolize the gaming platform when that same company has entered the digital software distribution business in direct competition with Valve.

[GreatEmerald]

actually i feel a little insecure, when i propose ubuntu to newbies (example elderly people that dont want to worry about viruses and causing mayhem to settings or deleting files that shouldnt be deleted) about the shops that you cannot even get rid of (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) and that the amazon symbol is stalking my shopping attempts...

so going back to why i use ubuntu and not arch or gentoo or fedora? its simple to install and i know how to maintain it with a reasonable amount of time and knowledge. i know that because of its size there are partners ready to admit, that ubuntu may have some weight as a userbase, there will be precompiled binaries that are easy to install. which means its not canonicals recent developements success.

For new users I would always recommend Mageia. They're specialised to be user-friendly. Learning how to administrate more distros is always a good thing, too. Don't be stuck with one distribution just because you're used to it. As for the precompiled binaries, as mentioned, openSUSE has just as many and they are just as easy (if not easier) to install.

[Rich Oliver]

Canonical have put their own interests before Linux Desktop /Laptop. We have a major split within Linux. SystemD and Wayland on the one hand. Ubuntu's Upstart and Mir on the other. This creates a serious problem for Debian, which ever they go it will be messy. Dictatorships in a project are not always wrong. Sometimes they get things done that committees can't. Shuttleworth's behaviour forces us to make a choice, to jump on his train or not. Shuttleworth has not been all bad, he has brought good things to Linux, but to my mind he clearly can not be trusted with the level of dominance that he demands. Linux desktop needs convergence.

My choice is to go with the Redhat, Opensuse, Arch, Mageia camp. If parts of D-bus go into the Kernel, then we might finally have some sort of real desktop operating system emerging. I'm currently working on a little Scala project. I'm writing a Scala X client and plan to write a Scala Wayland Client as soon as there's some reasonable documentation. I won't be writing a Mir client.

In addition I feel the future lies with convergence on Qt and Clang