I use to have a bit of a laugh when I heard people say they were running Ubuntu. I'd make the typical "cant install debian" jokes, etc.. It wasnt meant in any malicious way, just a bit of fun. The same as when I hear people say they are running gentoo I joke about spending 2 days compling to get maybe 1% increase in speed over an easier distro.

I dont do that anymore. Well, I still joke with gentoo users, in my experience most of them are used to it, and will joke back just as hard.

Ubuntu is moving more and more toward a windows style "you get what you are given, now shut up and use it" attitude. I could sort of deal with the moving the windows controls to the left, at least that was something you could move back if you wanted to. Even though the movement was to "make room for windicators", and they never came about.

But making plymouth a dependency for mountall is just crazy. I can see why they put plymouth in, even though its not my sort of thing, but making it something you cant remove...why?

Unity seems to be replicating a lot of the (overall) look of gnome-shell ('m not a gnome user, and I havent run gnome-shell though I have run unity, its just my impression from screenshots). I wouldnt be surprised if they make unity a hard dependency in the future.

Some of the things that have been posted here and there in the current disagreement with some of the gnome team by Shuttleworth are just silly. What is with "I was told that you were told about panel / indicator at the UX hackfest" in this day and age? From what I've seen, making 'bitchy' comments about collaboration based on "he said", word of mouth either shows a total lack of foresight, and/or is just misleading people, and/or is just picking a fight. I'd be temped to go with misleading (though they are not mutually exclusive) judging from other actions by Shuttleworth/canonical.

Saying that "all copyright assignment systems are equal" shows either a total lack of knowledge on the part of Shuttleworth, or more likely its just "spin" he has started sprouting to make the canonical contributor agreement look better than it is. When I consider that canonical has also said tat "google chrome is pen source" is at best a half-truth, and at worst a total lie.

Not that those are the only issues with ubuntu/canonical, but those are the ones that really pushed me over the edge.

Sure, if ubuntu (or gentoo!) does it for you, go ahead.

But I wont be using ubuntu ever again, if people ask me I recommend not using ubuntu in 97%+ of cases. I've totally withdrawn from the ubuntu forums due to the actions of canonical, and Shuttleworth by extension, as a result of whats happened over the last 1-2 years.

In the case of ubuntu, its about money and control.

To be blunt, Shuttleworth couldnt 'buy' his way into power with debian, the system doesn't work like that. He also would have found it a lot harder to make money of debian than with canonical. IMO it more about money than power though, Shuttleworth wasn't sinking money into canonical in the expectation of getting no returns......which is part of the reason why canonical is based in a tax haven.

That can't be entirely true, since Linux Mint is making money off of Debian now. With the way they have the "Mint Google search tool" by default in Iceweasel/Firefox (LMDE and the new Debian-based Xfce edition) and the ads they sell on their Forums.

If Canonical was "all about corporate profits" they could have done the same things (and I would gladly use them to support the project).

It took Ubuntu to "bring Debian to the people." Debian made no such effort until others gained fame and notoriety doing what Debian refused to do. If anything, Canonical is a tax write-off rather than a profit-seeking enterprise, other than in providing paid support for their free OS (mostly for servers).

-Robin

What about Ubuntu Music Store? Or getting more space on Ubuntu One? Or taking money from the Gnome project (no flame intended)? All that brings money to Ubuntu, and in future there will be more and more things that bring money to them (app store anyone?).
I don't think that Shuttleworth took Debian to bring it to the people, he took Debian because he needed a stable base with a a large repository. And of course they try to contribute to Debian, most of their work is done by them, so that is a natural behavior. But they don't do it because they are so nice.

Don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with getting money out of Linux. But they are not the perfectly fine corporation that is doing all thisto benefit the community and to not make money out of it.

I certainly hope that we are not scaring the OP from using Ubuntu if that is the OPs choice. It has its points. I started with it and am fond of it.

That said, dixiedancer, you should really take everything cascade9 posted pretty much as fact. Ubuntu WILL be making Unity a hard dependency I am very sure. Branding is the only thing that they are really interested in.

They are loosing the support of many devs because of their copyright policy. I doubt that this will hurt them much because they have some very fine devs in their employ.

They are cracking down on decent. It is not real safe to post critical opinions of Ubuntu development in the "Testing and Discussion" forum on the UFs and it is a part of the Development and Programing part of the UFs. Developers rarely look at the forums so it could be thought that such opinions there are silly anyway.

This is not, in fact, the case. The folks on the Testing forum are people that take the raw, unreleased OS and install it on their own hardware. This alone saves Canonicle millions of dollars in hardware costs and folks to run the hardware. Those folks have opinions. If they get to upity they can get together and raise hell in places that developers do watch. This is happening more and more and the Ubuntu folks do not like it a bit.

The IRC for communicating with users about design recently (last week) told one tester that if they did not like the design they were free to us a different distro. This is not the way to treat someone that has a suggestion for improving the design and is a veteran tester for your system.

The kind of thing has been going on, at least, since 10.04 was in development and it is getting more oppressive as time goes on.

I hope that someone comes to their senses, very soon, and starts reversing this trend. I am afraid that this will not happen.

Until it does, there is no chance that I will be using Ubuntu in any serious way. Not because it is a bad OS, it is not. Because I have no faith in the reliability of the folks behind it.

My wife uses 10.04 as her only OS on her box. I maintain it.

I use Debian Testing as my main OS and have several Ubuntu installs on her for nothing but playing with (some folks like to play computer games, I like to play games with my computer). I do not see Ubuntu as being safe to use for anything else at this point and have no faith what so ever that this will change.

It could very well be that I am wrong about this but several cycles of testing has lead me to this belief.

I doubt that I will be doing testing on future releases and this round is about over. I will miss it and the fine folks on the testing forum. I will not miss the heavy handed, hostile attitude of the Ubuntu and Canonicle folks at all.

They are absolutely right. I am free to use something else.

Oops, you're right! I completely overlooked those. I stand corrected!

And of course, Ubuntu is not the only distro that has "brought Debian to the people" (wish I could think of a better way to put that, it sounds so corny!). For folks who like KDE, there's Mepis, and for folks who like Xfce, there's Mint Xfce (now built on Debian Testing but easily changed to Debian Stable, which is what I think I'll do when 10.04 reaches end-of-life), PureOS, and Crunchbang to name a couple of them. All are superb Debian-based alternatives to Ubuntu ('cept Crunchbang seems a bit less "newbie friendly." Still awesome tho). If it's Canonical's "morals" that folks object to, there are now alternatives that have not been Ubuntu's equal for ease and simplicity until more recently. Now there are more to choose from, as easy as Ubuntu without the (same) ethical/political/moral dilemmas.

Thanks for the correction and a very informative thread,
Robin

I agree with tacticalbread, it isn't that Ubuntu sucks or that it isn't a real Linux distro, its just that it is so user friendly that you never really have to do anything on the command line to get anything to work. Using other distros will not make you a pro, but with other distros you really have to understand why everything works the way it does. If you can get your wireless to work on Ubuntu by clicking on your Network Manager Icon, that will not help you when you have to configure your wireless on a Debian, Fedora, Slackware or Gentoo a machine. I'm just saying that if you really want to know how things work behind the scenes, Ubuntu is not the best distro to go with simply because they hide all that other distros don't. Ubuntu is great to get started with Linux and test it out, see if you would like it to replace your Windows installation, but once you feel comfortable you should try out other distributions like Debian or Fedora.