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It makes me sad that Canonical is doing so many things to split the community. First they stuck to upstart, after everyone else moved over to systemd. Then, they decided to snub GNOME3 in order to create a new windowing environment called Unity. Now, they're trying to build their own copy of Wayland, codenamed Mir. Ubuntu still uses bzr, when most of the rest of the world uses git.

I guess maybe this was inevitable. They wanted to differentiate themselves from Red Hat and similar distros that were using the "normal" stack. But do we really need so many duplicate projects, so many of which seem to be duds?

Ultimately, Ubuntu wants to be Android. And it never will be, because Canonical doesn't have Google's engineering or financial resources, or a business model that would support such an undertaking. I understand the idealism, but as they say, "hope is a good breakfast, but a poor supper."

I feel like Ubuntu's decision to include adware like the Amazon toolbar is the first of many such decisions. Ultimately, they have to make a profit, and they're going to have to turn to "traditional methods." The traditional method for PC OEMs to make a profit is-- let's be honest here-- crapware. I fear that this is going to blacken the name of Linux for a lot of people. Already a lot of people think that "Linux" can't do suspend or hibernate properly, because Ubuntu often can't. Soon people are going to think that "Linux" is full of adware and spyware, simply because Ubuntu is. Sigh.




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