Thanks for the repost Andy.
I read about this last month, and I must admit that I felt glad that I'm not a
Ubuntu user.
I'm not so worried about Canonical collecting data, as I am about whether I
trust that Canonical has my best interests at heart. And that's why I don't
use Ubuntu.
There is an implicit trust that the distribution maintainers will take
decisions that are at least in the spirit of those that you would make
yourself. I realise that sometimes upstream makes big changes (generally with
good reason), but it's up to the distributions to decide if, when and how to
adapt to it. Personally, I'm a Debian guy, and with the slight exception of
early versions of KDE4 and Amarok (notably); the debian maintainers have done
a damn good job of giving me the system I need for both work and home.
However, once you remove that trust between user and maintainer, you stand to
lose users; quickly. I realise that Canonical has to pay the bills, and I know
they want to be new and flag-waving; but the flag you need to wave is "we have
happy users", not "we keep doing things and accidentally irritate you".
Canonical's influence has been massive, and beneficial; don't underestimate
that; particularly raising the expectations for the quality of the desktop.
Unfortunately, with this following hot on the heels of Unity, I think many
users might migrate to other distro's and not recommend Ubuntu at all. After
all, would you use a system out of choice if you didn't think you could trust
the developers? Isn't that WHY we use Linux at all?
Cheers,
Tim B.
--
Hampshire Linux User Group Chairman
--
Please post to: Hampshire@???
Web Interface:
https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire
LUG URL:
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