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The number of people switching to BSD because of this is exactly 0. Further, as an avid user of Ubuntu, who reaps the benefits of millions of work hours of De

The number of people switching to BSD because of this is exactly 0. Further, as an avid user of Ubuntu, who reaps the benefits of millions of work hours of Debian &/or Ubuntu employees, I'm ok with advertising whose source code I can audit, and modify even. And to think that the majority of dissenters are commenting from their closed source Macs & iPhones, or their equivalent commerical competitors, on Google funded browsers tracking their every click, is all a little ironic

johnklos 7y ago
And you know this number is zero why? This is just yet another quite literal example of how many GNU/Linux distros are becoming more like Windows - they do all sorts of things now that they were never asked to do, and it's up to us to fix things after a clean install.
- big_chungus 7y ago
  > many GNU/Linux distros are becoming more like Windows And others aren't. Though I disagreed with the SystemD move, I've quite enjoyed arch for years. There are also some excellent other options, for instance, Alpine is a Musl/Busybox/Linux distro that works great on old machines. I think most Linux users will move to a different Linux before moving to BSD for comfort reasons.
comex 7y ago
> The number of people switching to BSD because of this is exactly 0. Perhaps. There is at least one person who is now less likely to use Ubuntu after learning this: me. I have typically used a mix of Debian and Ubuntu for both desktop VMs and servers; now I am more likely to use Debian, which takes a significantly stronger privacy stance. I am commenting from an iPhone though. Safari is not Google funded and does not track every click, but I do believe that Apple is getting the kind of OS version stats that Ubuntu’s motd script sends. Relatively tame for commercial software, honestly, but Linux is a different story.
mwfunk 7y ago
Even if everything you wrote is 100% true (and I think it is), that's all tangential. The point is that nobody should be curling anything in a login script, not "HAHA DERP BSD BETTER". People having emotional reactions as if some tribe they imagine they belong to has been insulted by someone else who they imagine belongs to some other imaginary tribe, instead of just, "yeah that's wrong nobody should do that, let's do better" has always been one of the most off-putting things to me about the whole free software community, such as it is. It was annoying on Usenet in the mid-'90s, it was obnoxious whenever RMS prioritized that sort of thinking over actually just turning the other cheek and making the world a better place, and wow does it not do anyone any good decades later. My theory is that people get sucked into these black holes of rational thought because, like me, a lot of people drawn to the open source world tend to be obsessive introverts who often feel more comfortable with computers than people, and like me, are susceptible to getting sucked into feelings of belonging and camaraderie with often imaginary subcultures/tribes/families online or elsewhere, when in reality the only common thread is they're random people from mailing lists trying to work together towards a very narrow range of common goals. The instant people get sucked into the dark side, next thing you know they're going around IRL saying stuff like "ACTUALLY it's guh-noo SLASH lee-nooks and anything else is disrespectful and I will personally feel disrespected by anyone who defies me". And then all is lost and this whole thing becomes a net negative for everyone involved. No fun, no fun at all. Nobody should feel personally insulted by anyone pointing out obvious technical flaws in anything really, including their own work, but certainly not in open source operating systems that they may or may not even contribute to.
jmclnx 7y ago
True enough, but if the distro I used did that, I would move elsewhere. That distro only updates /etc/motd when the first line contains 'Linux', otherwise it is left untouched. The update only is changing the first line to the the output of "/bin/uname -sr"
rvz 7y ago
> Further, as an avid user of Ubuntu, who reaps the benefits of millions of work hours of Debian &/or Ubuntu employees, I'm ok with advertising whose source code I can audit, and modify even. Despite all of this, the number of people switching from Win/Mac to Linux is in negative territory. Why? Because they first advertise their switch on a blog-post or Twitter, then they later realize that they can't do basic tasks or keep up with new features added on Windows and Mac. They then have to live with half-working unstable hacks which they then ultimately switch back or dual boot. It's a bit misleading for Ubuntu to call itself "open-source" and "privacy respecting" when they're teaming up with Amazon planting adware and telemetry in the OS, which gives the impression that they already abandoned the idea of "privacy".

johnklos 7y ago

And you know this number is zero why? This is just yet another quite literal example of how many GNU/Linux distros are becoming more like Windows - they do all sorts of things now that they were never asked to do, and it's up to us to fix things after a clean install.

big_chungus 7y ago
> many GNU/Linux distros are becoming more like Windows And others aren't. Though I disagreed with the SystemD move, I've quite enjoyed arch for years. There are also some excellent other options, for instance, Alpine is a Musl/Busybox/Linux distro that works great on old machines. I think most Linux users will move to a different Linux before moving to BSD for comfort reasons.

comex 7y ago

> The number of people switching to BSD because of this is exactly 0. Perhaps. There is at least one person who is now less likely to use Ubuntu after learning this: me. I have typically used a mix of Debian and Ubuntu for both desktop VMs and servers; now I am more likely to use Debian, which takes a significantly stronger privacy stance. I am commenting from an iPhone though. Safari is not Google funded and does not track every click, but I do believe that Apple is getting the kind of OS version stats that Ubuntu’s motd script sends. Relatively tame for commercial software, honestly, but Linux is a different story.

mwfunk 7y ago

Even if everything you wrote is 100% true (and I think it is), that's all tangential. The point is that nobody should be curling anything in a login script, not "HAHA DERP BSD BETTER". People having emotional reactions as if some tribe they imagine they belong to has been insulted by someone else who they imagine belongs to some other imaginary tribe, instead of just, "yeah that's wrong nobody should do that, let's do better" has always been one of the most off-putting things to me about the whole free software community, such as it is. It was annoying on Usenet in the mid-'90s, it was obnoxious whenever RMS prioritized that sort of thinking over actually just turning the other cheek and making the world a better place, and wow does it not do anyone any good decades later. My theory is that people get sucked into these black holes of rational thought because, like me, a lot of people drawn to the open source world tend to be obsessive introverts who often feel more comfortable with computers than people, and like me, are susceptible to getting sucked into feelings of belonging and camaraderie with often imaginary subcultures/tribes/families online or elsewhere, when in reality the only common thread is they're random people from mailing lists trying to work together towards a very narrow range of common goals. The instant people get sucked into the dark side, next thing you know they're going around IRL saying stuff like "ACTUALLY it's guh-noo SLASH lee-nooks and anything else is disrespectful and I will personally feel disrespected by anyone who defies me". And then all is lost and this whole thing becomes a net negative for everyone involved. No fun, no fun at all. Nobody should feel personally insulted by anyone pointing out obvious technical flaws in anything really, including their own work, but certainly not in open source operating systems that they may or may not even contribute to.

jmclnx 7y ago

True enough, but if the distro I used did that, I would move elsewhere. That distro only updates /etc/motd when the first line contains 'Linux', otherwise it is left untouched. The update only is changing the first line to the the output of "/bin/uname -sr"

rvz 7y ago

> Further, as an avid user of Ubuntu, who reaps the benefits of millions of work hours of Debian &/or Ubuntu employees, I'm ok with advertising whose source code I can audit, and modify even. Despite all of this, the number of people switching from Win/Mac to Linux is in negative territory. Why? Because they first advertise their switch on a blog-post or Twitter, then they later realize that they can't do basic tasks or keep up with new features added on Windows and Mac. They then have to live with half-working unstable hacks which they then ultimately switch back or dual boot. It's a bit misleading for Ubuntu to call itself "open-source" and "privacy respecting" when they're teaming up with Amazon planting adware and telemetry in the OS, which gives the impression that they already abandoned the idea of "privacy".