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@mailman.lug.org.uk Web Interface: https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hampshire LUG URL: http://www.hantslug.org.uk --------------------------------------------------------------
