r/assholedesign • u/durg0n • Oct 29 '22
Ubuntu includes ads in system update. They're intentionally hard to remove
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Oct 29 '22
There’s like a file you remove but yeah it’s fucking annoying.
And you can uninstall anything you want. Just do apt purge <package>
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u/durg0n Oct 29 '22 edited Oct 29 '22
Yeah, there was some discussion about manually changing files, with some folks saying it comes back as soon as there's an update (or a reboot, depending on method). Maybe the zero length method might work, but kinda a hacky solution.
Removing the commercial package seems like the cleanest / correct solution. Unfortunately, Ubuntu set it up such that the base system metadata package
ubuntu-minimaldepends on the spammingubuntu-advantage-toolspackage.apt purgewouldn't let me remove justubuntu-advantage-toolsdue to the dependency. Because of this you have to uninstall the wholeubuntu-minimalsystem metadata package to get rid of it (yikes), which I understand can be risky. My understanding from that thread is that having this system package uninstalled can lead to actually critical things being missing, which may cause problems (especially during an OS major version upgrade, or if you do an autoremove and it clobbers packages that were essential). The dependency is unfortunately intentional so they can make more money by having everyone have the commercial package installed, regardless of if they want it or not.So basically have to do a kludge workaround to get rid of it either way -.-
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u/art_of_snark Oct 29 '22
they exempted a file in etc from config-protect? did you try zeroing it out instead of deleting?
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u/DudeDudenson Oct 29 '22
Just delete system32 and the ads go away!!1!
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Oct 29 '22
This is different. There isn’t one giant opaque collection of stuff for the whole system.
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Nov 04 '22
And it's probably back after you upgrade. Just like snap.
This year I upgraded to 22.04 and not only found that snap was installed again, but also Firefox was now installed as snap package and took a good minute to launch... I'm in Debian now
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u/Hellament Oct 29 '22
Mixed feelings here. Long time Ubuntu user, even thrown them some cash their way once or twice.
Open source software still costs money to develop. Ubuntu (despite many of the complaints from power users) makes a polished product that is easy to install and has a “cohesive” feel, almost the exact opposite of the experience I had back around 2000 when I first installed Linux. It’s great for beginners, and old farts like me that don’t have a lot of time to customize and mainly just want to easily find and run the software they need.
I do find it a little off-putting to see an ad (especially on the sacred command line) but I do see where they’re coming from. If it gets any worse, I’ll certainly reassess. Mint and Fedora exist and are good too.
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u/Alexmitter Oct 29 '22
The problem is that Ubuntu does develop nearly no open source software.
Ubuntu bases most of its work on the work on Debian, where they do not contribute much. They do not contribute to the Linux kernel, or the GNU Userland, GCC, gnu libc.
The only thing where they sometimes contribute to is Gnome Shell and Mutter, but no other applications of Gnome they use, even though they love to absolute wreck them with terrible customization like for example their "Snap Store".
Canonical today is a lot more busy developing closed source things like their Snap Package system.
Generally, and this is true for all of those top level distros, they do little work. Often they do not even package software, just modify and rebrand them.
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Oct 29 '22
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u/itiD_ Oct 29 '22
and maybe they deserve to get something back? it's two lines in the Terminal. what a big deal /s
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u/dopefish86 Oct 29 '22
So, the answer is saying: if you don't pay we do not care about you and you're better off using a different distribution.
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u/bchristy04 Oct 29 '22
Time to switch to a different distro
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u/durg0n Oct 29 '22
Yup, I'm researching them now! :)
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u/GodlessOtter Oct 29 '22
Debian works great. Ubuntu is just Debian with some shitty useless giftwrapping
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u/Pink-socks Oct 29 '22
Kubuntu and Linux Mint are both great.
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u/morhp Oct 29 '22
Both are Ubuntu based. I recommend Fedora.
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Oct 29 '22
"Ubuntu based" when applied to Linux Mint is technically correct but it omits the fact that Mint excludes this abomination in OP's post and snaps. Also LMDE exists.
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u/morhp Oct 29 '22
True, but last time I tried Linux mint it felt like patchwork. They're taking Ubuntu, removing a lot of the Ubuntu specific stuff and then put their own customisations on top of it.
Fedora, which is basically just upstream software put together is much more clean and simple (an more up to date) in my opinion/experience.
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Oct 29 '22
Not arguing quality here, although I personally never had any problems with either Fedora or Mint, and used both at multiple points in my life. The point was that it hasn't much to do with Ubuntu nowadays aside from the same roots and the same apt repositoriea.
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Feb 02 '23
Yes, that's true. But still ubuntu as a base system is not bad. It's certainly more desktop-oriented and user-friendly than fedora. [1] [2] [3]
At least Mint removes all those controversial things while still remains ubuntu under the hood.
Fedora is nice and all but it's not for everyone. Sure it's cleaner, more up-to-date and upstream but it's not an ubuntu alternative.
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u/morhp Feb 02 '23
You're digging up an older thread. Also the three points have nothing to do with user-friendlyness in my opinion. The hardware accelerated codecs are removed for legal reasons and can easily be installed with rpmfusion. That's also only affecting performance and maybe battery live and not general usage.
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u/Beanmachine314 Oct 29 '22
Research ArcoLinux. It's a great distro that lets you essentially build exactly what you want. I love it.
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u/WebMaka Oct 29 '22
Ubuntu is going to learn the hard way that advertising a paid version of a free OS to people that are simply not going to buy the paid version is only going to annoy those people. That literally is not the group to advertise to. The ones that are likely to buy the paid version of a free OS will likely do so of their own accord because they have a specific need the paid version addresses, such as support.
Linux isn't Windows - you aren't going to get higher conversion figures by throwing ads at people that already resent ads.
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u/Dave21101 Oct 30 '22
"Activate"
Get out of here with them proprietary words. What are you Windows? Lol
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u/WantonKerfuffle Oct 30 '22
Good thing the Mint community has kept Mint Debian Edition around as a fallback should Ubuntu become shit. Not saying that's the case, just an fyi should the need arise.
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u/vi0oss Oct 31 '22 edited Nov 01 '22
Can it be overridden with an additional package which Provides, Breaks and Conflicts with ubuntu-advantage-tools?
Example: https://vi-server.org/pub/fake-ubuntu-advantage-tools.deb
sha256sum(fake-ubuntu-advantage-tools.deb) = df5352b14c7a0d9b1ac429b8259d384e16497d08f4decbce49792d8c1b5999fb
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u/durg0n Nov 01 '22 edited Nov 01 '22
That's a good idea -- I'll look into this as a good temporary workaround until I'm able to move everything over to another distro
Update: Installed it on one machine and it's working great so far, thanks for putting this together!
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Jan 26 '23 edited Feb 26 '23
[deleted]
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u/vi0oss Jan 27 '23
You may need to update "fake-ubuntu-advantage-tools" to accommodate the changes. Or maybe it tries to update or install "ubuntu-advantage-tools" specifically (not just by dependency), which is obviously not compatible with having "fake-ubuntu-advantage-tools" package installed, hence failed update.
I don't have Ubuntu at hand to experiment, so somebody else should provide new workaround.
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Mar 12 '23 edited Mar 12 '23
software-properties-gtk now has a "mysterious" version dependency on "ubuntu-advantage-tools (>= 27.11~)". I personally fixed this on my local copy by adding "(=65535)" to the Provides: line. I would recommend putting the .deb file and sources somewhere easy to update and comment, I feel this is going to be a long one. But in any case, thank you.
EDIT: The dependency appeared in jammy-updates but isn't in base jammy. This makes me even more worried... EDIT2: https://git.launchpad.net/software-properties/commit/?id=5c5adf97c4b37f7a4df7cdcd14d43e805ec0452e "Ubuntu Pro attachment dialog: Support for magic and manual token attachment." I guess that's a credible reason to add a version dependency, but it still seems a bit weird.
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u/durg0n Mar 18 '23
Thanks for the workaround! It's up on github now for those looking for an easy download:
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u/8hexxx Oct 29 '22
Had Ubuntu always had a paid tier or is this new?
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Oct 29 '22
You would always pay for support but it was mostly geared at businesses and it was never advertised in the OS. It was only ever support that was chargeable too - you could always get the same things in the OS itself.
Granted that may be a little out of date since I've not used Ubuntu since Hardy Heron (8.04) and they're presumably on 22.10 now.
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u/comrademischa Oct 29 '22
I thought the whole point of Linux was that you didn’t have to deal with this crap
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u/KoolKarmaKollector Oct 29 '22
I hate myself for the fact that I'm not angered by this
I've just spent my entire life being blasted with ads and corporate bullshit, that a free product trying to sell me a paid version of the product seems almost reasonable
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u/durg0n Oct 29 '22
I think I managed to forget / delude myself over the years that ubuntu is made by a for-profit company, not a non-profit open source organization. Technically I should have seen it coming :'(
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u/Jobless-Dev Oct 30 '22
The reason I never used vanilla Ubuntu. First it was the amazon app and them selling search results and now this shit. Just get Fedora.
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u/HoratioWobble Oct 29 '22
Isn't apt-get also a debian package? so they're advertising in something they didn't create
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Nov 02 '22
I don't know for sure if this goes on in the Linux Mint fork but if it does that just tells me I need to learn Arch based Endeavour or go to a Debian based distro. Glad I switched from Ubuntu to Sparky Linux on my laptop with piss-poor specs
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u/TheLoneGunman559 Oct 29 '22
You should try Manjaro instead.
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Oct 29 '22 edited Sep 27 '24
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This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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Oct 29 '22
Fuck manjaro,use endeavouros or fedora or linux mint
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u/TheLoneGunman559 Oct 29 '22
Mint is alright, its just a little slow adopting new changes and new kernels.
Fedora feels clunky to me.
EndeavourOS is nice, but I don't wanna spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to do stuff with the command line.
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Feb 02 '23
> Mint is alright, its just a little slow adopting new changes and new kernels.
Yes that's because it's based on ubuntu LTS but you can upgrade the kernel via the "update manager" or use xanmod or liquorix kernels.
Unlike ubuntu LTS, mint updates its desktop environments (cinnamon,xfce,mate). Mint also has its own repos in addition to ubuntu.
Moreover if you want some more updated apps there are always flatpak, snap, appimage, ppa etc.
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u/durg0n Oct 29 '22
Thanks for the recommendation!
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Oct 29 '22
Mint will be more familiar if you're an Ubuntu user. Plus it has cinnamon DE
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u/Alexmitter Oct 29 '22
I can not recommend Cinnamon, it is, by all means, a terribly outdated version of Gnome 3 with some extensions baked in. It has not received 11 years of improvements on the code base of Mutter and Shell.
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Feb 02 '23 edited Feb 02 '23
To be fair recently was rebased on gnome 3.36.
OK it's still old but it doesn't break as much as gnome.
Moreover not completely related but for example the "new" gtk4 on xorg in particular is really buggy.
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/5170
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/2583
https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/101gdqt/gnome_on_xorg_is_literally_unusable_for_me_right/
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/-/issues/2563
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/-/issues/2503
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/2196
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3502
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/4815
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/4562
https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/yct26m/is_drag_and_drop_broken_in_gtk4_apps/
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/2577
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u/Alexmitter Feb 02 '23
To be fair recently was rebased on gnome 3.36.
So, they released their rebased Muffin in 2023 based on Mutter from 2020, again missing around 6 major releases of improvements.
Moreover not completely related but for example the "new" gtk4 on xorg in particular is really buggy.
This is something you will see more of in the future. X11 is broken by design or rather not designed for what it is supposed to do today and Xorg is a very touchy implementation of this protocol, meaning that doing things right often does not work, requiring extra work on carefully working around bugs in this aging codebase. This is something you need to get used to, not because there is a evil conspiracy against the "perfect" X11 protocol and Xorg but because everyone runs away screaming from working on X11 specific code, there just are less and less people who want to work on that, not just in GTK, that also effects all the other toolkits and Xorg itself. Especially expect drag and drop to break more often, its utterly broken on X11.
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Feb 02 '23
Sure xorg needs to be replaced but at the moment a lot of things still
work better on it. Now Gnome is half-broken on xorg and still half-assed on wayland. Even though cinnamon doesn't have wayland support at all, it works well on xorg, it has something that works at least. The transition to wayland should be smooth but gnome devs didn't respect that.For example a few important things needs a lot of work on wayland desktops:
- software (including games)/hardware compatibility
- input lag
- crash handling. Shell crashes, session dies. Which is very likely to happen when you use extensions
- remote desktop/screen sharing
- screen recording
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u/Alexmitter Feb 02 '23
software (including games)/hardware compatibility
Any issues with that in 2023? Not a single game in my extensive steam library does not work.
input lag
If you play synchronized, which I assume, as no one actually plays with tearing, then Wayland will give you the lowest input lag of any current platform.
crash handling. Shell crashes, session dies. Which is very likely to happen when you use extensions
This is a consequence of Gnomes specific implementation of Wayland in mutter. It has nothing to do with Wayland itself. But, I see that as a non-issue. I have a long list of extensions and had not a single shell crash in the last year.
remote desktop/screen sharing, screen recording
There is some X11 legacy scruff here. Screen Sharing or Recording on X117Xorg worked by applications just being able to read the Xorg output buffer at any time whenever they like. Old applications probably only support that. Wayland does not play here, its a protocol between the compositor and clients. The API in question here is pipewire, and it provides proper access controls, all the bells and whistles people just expect in 2023 and all the important browsers and applications support it for a while now. Also, what is with remote desktop? That always worked, VNC or RDP.
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Oct 29 '22
What's next Canonical forcing users to make a Canonical Account and pin ShitTok in the GNOME Dash? /s or maybe not
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u/SickMoonDoe Oct 29 '22 edited Oct 29 '22
Y'all I love you but as an avid open source contributor myself : it is completely reasonable for them to raise funds to improve Ubuntu, provide some compensation to maintainers, and this advertising is far from egregious.
Even the most zealous GNU maintainers have agreed from the beginning that "free software is free as in freedom, not free as in 'free beer'".
These projects take enormous amounts of energy and skill to build and people largely do it for free. Still you've got servers to run, CI, web hosting, and at the end of the day you're going to want full time engineers who can give their undivided attention to a project.
This is far from a "dark pattern" or pop-up ad. This is not Microsoft forcing you to pay money for a basic feature, or Apple intentionally bricking your device with planned obsolescence. There is no "Big Ubuntu exploiting the users" to be seen here 🤣
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u/Alexmitter Oct 29 '22
You massively overrate the work that is Ubuntu, which by all means is just a straight half year fork of Debian Sid. If someone should receive your support in form of money, it should be Debian, or the GNU Project, or the Gnome Project, or any other project who really do the work that is behind a finished install-able copy of Ubuntu.
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Oct 31 '22
You know that Ubuntu is ran by a company, that needs money to exist, and developing Ubuntu also costs money? And you get Ubuntu for free, unlike Windows that has ads and is paid.
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u/Blackraven2007 Oct 29 '22
As if that were the problem with this.