9 ms·

Canonical Launches Ubuntu Pro

71 points by ShowalkKama 4y ago

unixhero 4y ago
Linux Mint have been maintaining a Debian version for just those kind of reason. One misstep from Cannonocal and Mint is already and seamlessly available on Debian for all eternity. https://linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php https://linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php
- haunter 4y ago
  At that point why not just use Debian instead?
  - unixhero 4y ago
    It's just very smooth how the user experience unfolds to you as a user. But you have a point!
ThinkBeat 4y ago
Will this cause a significant shift away from Ubuntu? In the startup world, much less so in the enterprise world, I hear a lot of "We dont use Windows because it is too expensive and we dont wish to spend the money on licenses". (There are also many people who are just ideologically opposed to Windows) I hear the same thing when it comes to RDBMS and other vital software, Oracle, Microsoft are too expensive to license. Having worked in both the business Enterprise world, "We dont use any software if we cant license support and .. " with startups "We dont use any software that is not free and open source" Aside from the fact that they are developing the next unicorn SaaS that they will charge $$$$ for. It might mean more adoption on the Enterprise side, though RedHat or one already provides this. I would think it could cause a shit in the startup crowd unless they figure Ubuntu will be available for free as well so they dont want ot worry about license costs
osigurdson 4y ago
I don't understand why they don't make the default Ubuntu theme a bit nicer. It seems that they would merely have to hire a single designer to improve this materially.
- beermonster 4y ago
  What is it you think could be improved ?
  - symlinkk 4y ago
    The purple / orange theme is gross looking and clashes with neutral colors from third parties. It just looks extremely unprofessional. They should just ship vanilla GNOME, it’s beautiful.
    - sbuk 4y ago
      Beauty is very much in the eye of the beholder.
      - osigurdson 4y ago
        A good read on this theme is Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance.
  - osigurdson 4y ago
    I'm not a designer so it is difficult to point out exactly how it should be improved. My reaction to it however is it has a very amateur look in my opinion. I've typically installed Gnome extensions to make it look better (though I think the one I've been using is probably going a little too far for most users).
- echelon 4y ago
  I would pay for this. If they could get rid of the slow LibreOffice garbage and make the audio / video system more stable, I'd pay a monthly fee. I would pay for Firefox too.
Wronnay 4y ago
Why should any company buy this? Does that mean, that these security updates are exclusive to Ubuntu Pro and everybody else won't get Vulnerabilities fixed? Aren't security upgrades anyway getting deployed - I mean, if Canonical would hold bug fixes for Vulnerabilities back, then obviously the community would switch to a different Linux Distro? Especially this sentence makes me wondering: "Many zero-day vulnerabilities addressed under embargo, with critical CVEs patched in less than 24h on average" => This sounds like Canonical holds back zero-day vulnerabilities for not-paying users!
- nicce 4y ago
  Hopefully it just means extended duration for getting patches. If not… yikes.
- akdor1154 4y ago
  From TFA: > Ubuntu Pro expands security coverage for critical, high and medium Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) to thousands of applications and toolchains, including Ansible, Apache Tomcat, Apache Zookeeper, Docker, Drupal, Nagios, Node.js, phpMyAdmin, Puppet, PowerDNS, Python 2, Redis, Rust, WordPress, and more. So sounds like coverage of a bunch of stuff in their Universe repository that is not part of the base system. Though I found my own thing to whinge about, on https://ubuntu.com/security https://ubuntu.com/security: > Ubuntu [...] includes access to: > - ... > - Knowledge Base: a private archive of expert-written articles and tutorials Wait what?
  - emj 4y ago
    > > - Knowledge Base: a private archive Common thing for enterprise customers, I can not speak for Ubuntu but usually they are private because they are filled with bad articles and tutorials that no one would pay for. Sounds good though.
- fulafel 4y ago
  Souns like it's security updates for otherwise out of support versions, 16.04, like MS sells (sold?) for Windows XP.
- 4y ago
superkuh 4y ago
For all I disagree with canonical's desktop decisions their long term support of their distro is currently unmatched. You can't get 10 years anywhere else. Canonical's (free!) Extended Service Maintainance (ESM) program has been extremely valuable to me for the last decade. They still support security updates on Ubuntu 14.04 (April 2014) till 2024. Hopefully this rebranding of parts of ESM won't change that support.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  > You can't get 10 years anywhere else. That's been Red Hat's thing since forever. And Rocky is free.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Good luck leeching Red Hat distributions, apparently no one learned with CentOS.
  - gw99 4y ago
    They'll hire all Rocky contributors in under 3 years and turn it into a rolling distribution. That's how Redhat works.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
      That's besides the point and probably not accurate anyways. First, my original point is that Ubuntu is only just breaking into the territory already firmly dominated by Red hat. The presence or absence of a free edition of EL doesn't really change that. Second, that's not really how Red Hat works either; even CentOS lasted for longer than 3 years. Finally, even if that was how Red Hat worked, that doesn't mean it's how Rocky works. I'm skeptical that a community operated project is going to come to the exact conditions that led to it being created in the first place. And honestly, even if they somehow did, there's like three other projects all doing free respins of RHEL.
    - hazard 4y ago
      Want to bet? Literally, I mean. I'll bet you $100 that they will not hire all Rocky contributors in under 3 years and turn it into a rolling distribution.
alpaca128 4y ago
Apparently they also launched pretty horrible cookie popup dark patterns. Come on Canonical, even Google learned to do it properly by now.
- stjohnswarts 4y ago
  what cookie popup dark pattern are you referring to? I didn't see any popups.
  - jeroenhd 4y ago
    These are the popups (I clicked the "manage" button) I'm seeing when clicking this link: https://files.catbox.moe/wbfkk0.png https://files.catbox.moe/wbfkk0.png https://files.catbox.moe/ckx2k7.png https://files.catbox.moe/ckx2k7.png I think there was already some kind of GDPR court case that forced Google to make a one-click opt-out button because adding extra steps for opting out is not acceptable, but Canonical isn't exactly a privacy-consciour company so I guess they'll wait for one of the overworked DPAs to act.
    - stjohnswarts 4y ago
      Ah I guess consent-o-matic must have blocked those. almost forgot I had that extension installed.
      - blacksmith_tb 4y ago
        Sadly not for me, I have Consent-o-matic installed and still got the "turn on all trackers! (or the minimum)" modal.
ginko 4y ago
So Debian?
- esbeeb 4y ago
  I'm using Linux Mint Debian Edition 5, and recommend it. It has the deep sensibility of Linux Mint, but it's _not_ based off Ubuntu. The Cinnamon desktop in LMDE5 has much more polish than Debian 11's Cinnamon desktop, which I also tried and hated within 2 hours (the user management - namely adding additional users who don't inherit the group memberships they sensibly should - is hot garbage).
  - lproven 4y ago
    LMDE is pretty good, but you have to like Cinnamon. I gave it an extended test this year. 6 months or more. I can't get on with it. Allegedly there's a new Debian remix coming from the originator of Ubuntu Mate. That sounds promising. The snag is, I don't like Mate much, either. Its vertical taskbars are non-functional rubbish. The best I've seen recently is MX Linux, the original Xfce edition.
- Jedd 4y ago
  It does feel like every year or two Ubuntu does something that annoys a large lump of its user base, who proceed to express an interest in moving to something more ethical / predictable, but also seem to be unaware of Debian. It's a bit bewildering.
- wrycoder 4y ago
  No, if you are going to switch, use Devuan.
- stubish 4y ago
  I don't think Debian has the resources to do 10 year support, even if they can make use of the patches Canonical will be providing.
gfaster 4y ago
I'm personally still upset that they made all the ubuntu-advantage software a) come preinstalled b) making it impossible to uninstall because it's a dependency of ubuntu-minimal[1] [1]: https://packages.ubuntu.com/bionic/ubuntu-minimal https://packages.ubuntu.com/bionic/ubuntu-minimal
unpopularopp 4y ago
wow just had a daily apt-get update/upgrade and got a Pro ad in the terminal, pretty crazy https://files.catbox.moe/bzqkry.png https://files.catbox.moe/bzqkry.png
- version_five 4y ago
  That is not cool and should be the headline. Maybe it's time to start looking for another distro if Ubuntu's time is coming to an end.
  - timbit42 4y ago
    I left Ubuntu when they started pushing snaps. Linux Mint and Debian are much better.
    - rhamzeh 4y ago
      I personally chose Fedora Silverblue (that has been amazing!) after after all those snaps. I've never had an easier and more seamless time upgrading across major versions, and that includes my previous experience with Ubuntu, Arch, Mac, Android, Windows and Debian. Luckily for me, I was already into podman and flatpak on Ubuntu, so swiching wasn't hard beyond forgetting that I can't do apt anymore every once in a while. Debian would have been my choice bad silverblue not worked worked for me.
      - dTal 4y ago
        Arch doesn't have "major versions".
        rhamzeh 4y ago
        My experience back then (10~12 years ago) with Arch was issues upgrading in general, granted I was using it wrong, but in one instance I remember the networking daemon got upgraded, but there was no uodates for something core that depended on it which lead to a non-functioning network until I managed to copy files over USB and revert.
jeroenhd 4y ago
This is new: $ sudo apt upgrade Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Calculating upgrade... Done Try Ubuntu Pro beta with a free personal subscription on up to 5 machines. Learn more at https://ubuntu.com/pro 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded $ This removes the spam and hopefully prevents this issue from showing up again: sudo ln -s /dev/null /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20apt-esm-hook.conf Can't wait for these ads to show up in the cron emails from my automated upgrade scripts. I know apt doesn't have a stable console output but I shouldn't need to defend against ads in the output.
- roylez 4y ago
  `sudo systemctl mask motd-news.timer`
- garciansmith 4y ago
  That line didn't work for me. This did though: sudo rm /var/lib/ubuntu-advantage/messages/*.tmpl
- jbirer 4y ago
  Yep, this pretty much ends Ubuntu for me. It was a good run, 8.04 was a historic release, but it has definitely gone off the rails now.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Thankfully there are always forks available for those that won't pay for the work of others. When in the end only commercial Linux distributions get the goodies, don't be sad.
    - jbirer 4y ago
      We always had the goodies, developed by the open source community. GIMP is easier to my hand than Photoshop in a lot of uses. The encroaching of the subscription model into Linux is not something acceptable to me though.
lofaszvanitt 4y ago
Still an emmental...
chazeon 4y ago
The five free machines remind me of Portainer. For personal dev machines, I would actually prefer Arch over Ubuntu. I wonder how long people would switch off Ubuntu because of these; now, I hope the sooner, the better.

71 points by ShowalkKama 4y ago

Linux Mint have been maintaining a Debian version for just those kind of reason. One misstep from Cannonocal and Mint is already and seamlessly available on Debian for all eternity. https://linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php https://linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php

haunter 4y ago
At that point why not just use Debian instead?
- unixhero 4y ago
  It's just very smooth how the user experience unfolds to you as a user. But you have a point!

ThinkBeat 4y ago

Will this cause a significant shift away from Ubuntu? In the startup world, much less so in the enterprise world, I hear a lot of "We dont use Windows because it is too expensive and we dont wish to spend the money on licenses". (There are also many people who are just ideologically opposed to Windows) I hear the same thing when it comes to RDBMS and other vital software, Oracle, Microsoft are too expensive to license. Having worked in both the business Enterprise world, "We dont use any software if we cant license support and .. " with startups "We dont use any software that is not free and open source" Aside from the fact that they are developing the next unicorn SaaS that they will charge $$$$ for. It might mean more adoption on the Enterprise side, though RedHat or one already provides this. I would think it could cause a shit in the startup crowd unless they figure Ubuntu will be available for free as well so they dont want ot worry about license costs

osigurdson 4y ago

I don't understand why they don't make the default Ubuntu theme a bit nicer. It seems that they would merely have to hire a single designer to improve this materially.

beermonster 4y ago
What is it you think could be improved ?
- symlinkk 4y ago
  The purple / orange theme is gross looking and clashes with neutral colors from third parties. It just looks extremely unprofessional. They should just ship vanilla GNOME, it’s beautiful.
  - sbuk 4y ago
    Beauty is very much in the eye of the beholder.
    - osigurdson 4y ago
      A good read on this theme is Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance.
- osigurdson 4y ago
  I'm not a designer so it is difficult to point out exactly how it should be improved. My reaction to it however is it has a very amateur look in my opinion. I've typically installed Gnome extensions to make it look better (though I think the one I've been using is probably going a little too far for most users).
echelon 4y ago
I would pay for this. If they could get rid of the slow LibreOffice garbage and make the audio / video system more stable, I'd pay a monthly fee. I would pay for Firefox too.

Wronnay 4y ago

Why should any company buy this? Does that mean, that these security updates are exclusive to Ubuntu Pro and everybody else won't get Vulnerabilities fixed? Aren't security upgrades anyway getting deployed - I mean, if Canonical would hold bug fixes for Vulnerabilities back, then obviously the community would switch to a different Linux Distro? Especially this sentence makes me wondering: "Many zero-day vulnerabilities addressed under embargo, with critical CVEs patched in less than 24h on average" => This sounds like Canonical holds back zero-day vulnerabilities for not-paying users!

nicce 4y ago
Hopefully it just means extended duration for getting patches. If not… yikes.
akdor1154 4y ago
From TFA: > Ubuntu Pro expands security coverage for critical, high and medium Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) to thousands of applications and toolchains, including Ansible, Apache Tomcat, Apache Zookeeper, Docker, Drupal, Nagios, Node.js, phpMyAdmin, Puppet, PowerDNS, Python 2, Redis, Rust, WordPress, and more. So sounds like coverage of a bunch of stuff in their Universe repository that is not part of the base system. Though I found my own thing to whinge about, on https://ubuntu.com/security https://ubuntu.com/security: > Ubuntu [...] includes access to: > - ... > - Knowledge Base: a private archive of expert-written articles and tutorials Wait what?
- emj 4y ago
  > > - Knowledge Base: a private archive Common thing for enterprise customers, I can not speak for Ubuntu but usually they are private because they are filled with bad articles and tutorials that no one would pay for. Sounds good though.
fulafel 4y ago
Souns like it's security updates for otherwise out of support versions, 16.04, like MS sells (sold?) for Windows XP.
4y ago

superkuh 4y ago

For all I disagree with canonical's desktop decisions their long term support of their distro is currently unmatched. You can't get 10 years anywhere else. Canonical's (free!) Extended Service Maintainance (ESM) program has been extremely valuable to me for the last decade. They still support security updates on Ubuntu 14.04 (April 2014) till 2024. Hopefully this rebranding of parts of ESM won't change that support.

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
> You can't get 10 years anywhere else. That's been Red Hat's thing since forever. And Rocky is free.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Good luck leeching Red Hat distributions, apparently no one learned with CentOS.
- gw99 4y ago
  They'll hire all Rocky contributors in under 3 years and turn it into a rolling distribution. That's how Redhat works.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    That's besides the point and probably not accurate anyways. First, my original point is that Ubuntu is only just breaking into the territory already firmly dominated by Red hat. The presence or absence of a free edition of EL doesn't really change that. Second, that's not really how Red Hat works either; even CentOS lasted for longer than 3 years. Finally, even if that was how Red Hat worked, that doesn't mean it's how Rocky works. I'm skeptical that a community operated project is going to come to the exact conditions that led to it being created in the first place. And honestly, even if they somehow did, there's like three other projects all doing free respins of RHEL.
  - hazard 4y ago
    Want to bet? Literally, I mean. I'll bet you $100 that they will not hire all Rocky contributors in under 3 years and turn it into a rolling distribution.

alpaca128 4y ago

Apparently they also launched pretty horrible cookie popup dark patterns. Come on Canonical, even Google learned to do it properly by now.

stjohnswarts 4y ago
what cookie popup dark pattern are you referring to? I didn't see any popups.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  These are the popups (I clicked the "manage" button) I'm seeing when clicking this link: https://files.catbox.moe/wbfkk0.png https://files.catbox.moe/wbfkk0.png https://files.catbox.moe/ckx2k7.png https://files.catbox.moe/ckx2k7.png I think there was already some kind of GDPR court case that forced Google to make a one-click opt-out button because adding extra steps for opting out is not acceptable, but Canonical isn't exactly a privacy-consciour company so I guess they'll wait for one of the overworked DPAs to act.
  - stjohnswarts 4y ago
    Ah I guess consent-o-matic must have blocked those. almost forgot I had that extension installed.
    - blacksmith_tb 4y ago
      Sadly not for me, I have Consent-o-matic installed and still got the "turn on all trackers! (or the minimum)" modal.

ginko 4y ago

So Debian?

esbeeb 4y ago
I'm using Linux Mint Debian Edition 5, and recommend it. It has the deep sensibility of Linux Mint, but it's _not_ based off Ubuntu. The Cinnamon desktop in LMDE5 has much more polish than Debian 11's Cinnamon desktop, which I also tried and hated within 2 hours (the user management - namely adding additional users who don't inherit the group memberships they sensibly should - is hot garbage).
- lproven 4y ago
  LMDE is pretty good, but you have to like Cinnamon. I gave it an extended test this year. 6 months or more. I can't get on with it. Allegedly there's a new Debian remix coming from the originator of Ubuntu Mate. That sounds promising. The snag is, I don't like Mate much, either. Its vertical taskbars are non-functional rubbish. The best I've seen recently is MX Linux, the original Xfce edition.
Jedd 4y ago
It does feel like every year or two Ubuntu does something that annoys a large lump of its user base, who proceed to express an interest in moving to something more ethical / predictable, but also seem to be unaware of Debian. It's a bit bewildering.
wrycoder 4y ago
No, if you are going to switch, use Devuan.
stubish 4y ago
I don't think Debian has the resources to do 10 year support, even if they can make use of the patches Canonical will be providing.

gfaster 4y ago

I'm personally still upset that they made all the ubuntu-advantage software a) come preinstalled b) making it impossible to uninstall because it's a dependency of ubuntu-minimal[1] [1]: https://packages.ubuntu.com/bionic/ubuntu-minimal https://packages.ubuntu.com/bionic/ubuntu-minimal

unpopularopp 4y ago

wow just had a daily apt-get update/upgrade and got a Pro ad in the terminal, pretty crazy https://files.catbox.moe/bzqkry.png https://files.catbox.moe/bzqkry.png

version_five 4y ago
That is not cool and should be the headline. Maybe it's time to start looking for another distro if Ubuntu's time is coming to an end.
- timbit42 4y ago
  I left Ubuntu when they started pushing snaps. Linux Mint and Debian are much better.
  - rhamzeh 4y ago
    I personally chose Fedora Silverblue (that has been amazing!) after after all those snaps. I've never had an easier and more seamless time upgrading across major versions, and that includes my previous experience with Ubuntu, Arch, Mac, Android, Windows and Debian. Luckily for me, I was already into podman and flatpak on Ubuntu, so swiching wasn't hard beyond forgetting that I can't do apt anymore every once in a while. Debian would have been my choice bad silverblue not worked worked for me.
    - dTal 4y ago
      Arch doesn't have "major versions".
      - rhamzeh 4y ago
        My experience back then (10~12 years ago) with Arch was issues upgrading in general, granted I was using it wrong, but in one instance I remember the networking daemon got upgraded, but there was no uodates for something core that depended on it which lead to a non-functioning network until I managed to copy files over USB and revert.

jeroenhd 4y ago

This is new: $ sudo apt upgrade Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done Calculating upgrade... Done Try Ubuntu Pro beta with a free personal subscription on up to 5 machines. Learn more at https://ubuntu.com/pro 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded $ This removes the spam and hopefully prevents this issue from showing up again: sudo ln -s /dev/null /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20apt-esm-hook.conf Can't wait for these ads to show up in the cron emails from my automated upgrade scripts. I know apt doesn't have a stable console output but I shouldn't need to defend against ads in the output.

roylez 4y ago
`sudo systemctl mask motd-news.timer`
garciansmith 4y ago
That line didn't work for me. This did though: sudo rm /var/lib/ubuntu-advantage/messages/*.tmpl
jbirer 4y ago
Yep, this pretty much ends Ubuntu for me. It was a good run, 8.04 was a historic release, but it has definitely gone off the rails now.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Thankfully there are always forks available for those that won't pay for the work of others. When in the end only commercial Linux distributions get the goodies, don't be sad.
  - jbirer 4y ago
    We always had the goodies, developed by the open source community. GIMP is easier to my hand than Photoshop in a lot of uses. The encroaching of the subscription model into Linux is not something acceptable to me though.

lofaszvanitt 4y ago

Still an emmental...

chazeon 4y ago

The five free machines remind me of Portainer. For personal dev machines, I would actually prefer Arch over Ubuntu. I wonder how long people would switch off Ubuntu because of these; now, I hope the sooner, the better.