15 ms·

Canonical shows ads in the Ubuntu CLI

221 points by reidrac 4y ago

rzzzwilson 4y ago
I've noticed this. That and the apparent decreased stability of the environment on Ubuntu has led me to start looking at possible replacements.
- atemerev 4y ago
  I've switched to Fedora a few years ago, and quite happy about that.
- creshal 4y ago
  Debian for servers that need to run unattended for years, Arch for everything else.
- NexRebular 4y ago
  One of the BSDs or illumos
kstenerud 4y ago
This and other things (example: snap) have led me to switch back to Debian, which has come a long way on the user side in the past decade!
- steeleduncan 4y ago
  I've had a similar experience. Most of the little irritations that induced me to switch to Ubuntu have been solved in the base Debian distro. Some of Ubuntu's default settings are still a little more user friendly, but it is really not hard to fix them, certainly less irksome to me than seeing ads on my CLI.
- solarkraft 4y ago
  This is it. Debian is like Ubuntu but without all the cruft. ... and with older packages, but that's usually okay. Reject ads in your shell, return to Debian.
  - planede 4y ago
    > and with older packages, but that's usually okay Just use sid/unstable. Debian really did a disservice for naming it "unstable". Don't use "testing".
    - tovej 4y ago
      Eh, I had the C++ standard library break on unstable a year ago. That's not really acceptable, I'd say unstable is a fair name. There's a few system-breaking changes a year, e.g. gnuplot broke last month.
  - xamolxix 4y ago
    > Debian is like Ubuntu but without all the cruft. Unfortunately for me, I only seem to like the font rendering in Ubuntu, any other distro I tried (and I habitually try lots) don't seem to get it quite right (for my taste anyway).
- creshal 4y ago
  My only gripe with Debian is the "we do support systemd, but not really, but also we don't fully support not using it, so all packages are an eldritch abomination of systemd services loading initscripts loading systemd services loading initscripts" situation that keeps making service debugging harder than it has any right to be.
hericium 4y ago
When most of the IT world was hiding OS and software names from leaking from prompts, pre-login banners etc, Canonical was injecting "Ubuntu" string into every such place imaginable to advertise their distro.
CSDude 4y ago
To be honest, I'd not be too bothered by that specific ad. Hoever, I gave up using Ubuntu long ago with the push for snap applications and all the mayhem it caused. * Oh, you want to install a package, here are two very distant versions in snap and apt. Select one! * Oh you selected snap, sorry now all program starts are slow now because we need to mount compressed disk for sandboxing. * Oh, this snap does not support sandboxing, here install with --classic flag. I use macOS daily, but when I need Linux, I use Arch btw (meme) but seriously it's much more clear.
- intelVISA 4y ago
  Snap did it for me tbh
- anthropodie 4y ago
  Moved to debian after using Ubuntu for a decade and I am not looking back. But I think Ubuntu was necessary for me to see beauty of Debian.
  - miroljub 4y ago
    Do you use Debian as a desktop? Would it be possible to switch from Ubuntu to Debian without having to reinstall the whole system? I hope something like updating sources to debian unstable and doing apt-get upgrade should just work, but am afraid to try it on the running system.
    - watashiato 4y ago
      It can be done, but don't attempt this unless you're ready to fix a ton of tiny problems all over the place. Backup your data and move it over to a fresh installation instead.
    - GlacierFox 4y ago
      No, absolutely not. Although people colloquially refer to Ubuntu as Debian with a little stuff sprinkled on top, parts of the underlying architecture are fundamentally different. Here's a video of someone giving it a go. (Doesn't even boot) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4dD_cbV5aw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4dD_cbV5aw
noobermin 4y ago
So I upvoted expecting the worst, but this isn't that bad. The only thing I'd be worried about is canonical selling ads to third parties in terminal, then yes, fuck that. EDIT: stuff like this isn't that new. GNU Parallel has that infamous "cite me in your work" long ramble every time you invoked it until you used a flag claiming you'd cite them. This is an ad which makes it commercial may be, potentially raising a different level of ickyness at least in some people's minds, but it definitely is of the same kind of behavior. At the very least, if you're paying canonical, that shouldn't be there.
- hericium 4y ago
  So everything free should be filled with ads? Even FOSS?
  - chrisseaton 4y ago
    Who said ‘should’? If that’s what the creators want what business is it of yours?
    - hericium 4y ago
      > If that’s what the creators want what business is it of yours? Of course - users must want exactly what creators want and products are created by creators for creators.
      - chrisseaton 4y ago
        People create what they want to create. If it’s not what you wanted that’s your problem not theirs.
    - ThunderSizzle 4y ago
      Users aren't required to use it either
      - chrisseaton 4y ago
thefz 4y ago
I don't care honestly, and we have the option to disable the motd anyway. It's all to sponsor a free program to extend the security of some machines. Ubuntu has done more good than harm to open source adoption.
- hericium 4y ago
  It's an apt output, not motd.
  - creshal 4y ago
    What a time to be alive: Canonical is putting so many different ads into Ubuntu that people confuse them when they're telling you it's nothing to worry about.
    - nirimda 4y ago
      Well at least they're taking their own advice, if the worry about it so little that they don't even know where the ads they aren't worried about are showing.
perihelions 4y ago
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4558049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4558049 ("Ubuntu Will Now Have Amazon Ads Pre-Installed", 2012)
- lapser 4y ago
  How is this related? This was a) 10 years ago, b) nothing to do with injecting it in a cli, and c) in this instance Canonical is advertising their own product, within their own product, compared to the original where Amazon paid Canonical to advertise for them.
- drooopy 4y ago
  They are only related in the sense that both involve Ubuntu Linux.
CGamesPlay 4y ago
When most people think "ad", they think that third parties are collecting data about the computer or user attached to it, and then those third parties respond with a bid and an ad. (Maybe this is done real-time like on the web these days, maybe in advance based on demographics and surveys like on TV.) But this is just self-promotion (the second-party is showing this), and not targeted (the second party didn't collect any signal to decide what ad to show). So yes, possibly annoying that a commercial Linux distro is trying to advertise their commercial products, but hardly nefarious.
- benj111 4y ago
  No, but the thing is about the shell is you can automate it, so random stuff could break shell scripts. Plus if I wanted random companies marketing things to me I'd use Windows.
  - Denvercoder9 4y ago
    > No, but the thing is about the shell is you can automate it, so random stuff could break shell scripts. In this particular case, the user used the "apt" command, which is meant to be used by humans and not by scripts. It's explicitly documented that its output is unstable, and prints out a warning when stdout is not an interactive tty. For scripting, use of the apt-get/apt-cache/etc tools is recommended.
    - nirimda 4y ago
      Fwiw, it's included in the output of `apt-get dist-upgrade`, so using `apt-get` is not going to immunise you from unnecessarily patching scripts that break.
- kstenerud 4y ago
  When most people think "ad", they think of injecting an attempt to sell you something into an environment where it would not naturally occur, pulling your attention away from what you were doing (commercials, billboards, web pages, magazines, command line tools, MOTDs, books - oh wait they don't do it there yet).
kar1181 4y ago
Getting ready to be acquired by Microsoft I guess. I've spent a lot of time with Ubuntu it's been a faithful friend for so long but I do wonder what the 10+ year roadmap looks like for Canonical and maybe this is an indication.
- tux2bsd 4y ago
intelVISA 4y ago
Ubuntu is basically Windows-lite nowadays sadly w/ the new direction by Canonical & friends; I quite liked the distro but I've had to become an "Arch btw" kinda person now.
- hef19898 4y ago
  That 's strange, just updated to latest version, 20.22 or something, and didn't get any promp whatsoever, upgrades run painlessly, including Lenovo stuff. Until now, I wasn't even aware ther was a pro version of it...
  - tryauuum 4y ago
    latest version is probably 22.10
    - intelVISA 4y ago
      Ubuntu 11 now with Windows (Telemetry) Subsystem for Canonical plus GNU/Linux
    - hef19898 4y ago
      22.04, coming from 20.04, if looked up correctly. So from Fosa something to something Jellyfish. Only thing that doesn't work anymore is that darktable lost a lens profile of one of my older lenses. Pretty sure so that this has nothing to do with Ubuntu so, and the profiles of the newer ones work perfectly fine as well.
atemerev 4y ago
Fedora is now my distro of choice for most of purposes. It is also well supported, easily upgraded between releases, and do not have this sort of pushing things down the throat as of yet.
- petepete 4y ago
  Fedora nails the basics. Nice installer, unadulterated GNOME, well-stocked official repos and easy to add third party ones. That's all I want these days. The only negative thing I have to say about my day to day Linux use is caused by Nvidia's shitty driver and power management issues. My next build will be AMD (or maybe Intel) graphics.
  - atemerev 4y ago
    Nvidia works fine for me (even with Wayland) since Fedora 36 (the latest). With X, it worked fine since ages. I am a researcher and simulations developer, so I can't live without CUDA.
    - petepete 4y ago
      For the most part it works for me, but there are some definite rough edges. For example, I had to disable suspend because sometimes it doesn't wake properly. I need to reboot to make it work again. The fact I needed to enable a bunch of services (nvidia-suspend.service and friends) to even get it to sleep was enough of a pain. I'm running a 1660 GTX so it's not like I have a niche card with special functionality or anything, it's very run-of-the-mill. Compared to my laptop (ThinkPad), where everything just worked, it's a chore. I set up a (Beelink) computer for my parents with AMD graphics and it's been flawless for the past year, I've not even had to do any tech support in that time.
- christophilus 4y ago
  Yeah. Fedora is my favorite. I like Debian and Arch, and am philosophically more aligned with community-driven projects like those. But Fedora hits the sweet spot, so I’m using it until IBM royally screws it up.
stevewatson301 4y ago
I don't get the outrage. I don't see people say similar things when authors display "sponsor my work on OpenCollective/Github Sponsors" through messages on npm install and the like. A simple text notification offering a paid service for an otherwise free OSS software is really pushing the definition of what an "ad" is.
- input_sh 4y ago
  It's not even paid, at least not for personal use. From the website: > Anyone can use Ubuntu Pro for free on up to 5 machines, or 50 if you are an official Ubuntu Community member. From what I can tell it's LTS but with double support (10 years instead of 5).
- Arnavion 4y ago
  >I don't see people say similar things when authors display "sponsor my work on OpenCollective/Github Sponsors" through messages on npm install and the like. People did say similar things about that. It was a big shitshow. https://www.zdnet.com/article/npm-bans-terminal-ads/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/npm-bans-terminal-ads/ And even if you don't count donation requests as ads, the article mentions those too: >The upcoming change will allow developers to silence any type of non-error terminal messages, such as ads, or calls for donations -- an issue many times more widespread[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] than Funding's ads ever were. Those are all links to people complaining about donation requests.
- rroot 4y ago
  >notification offering a paid service I think a "notification offering a paid service" could be pretty good definition of an ad, certainly no "pushing the definition" in that.
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  The packages installed by npm install are not Debian packages, and don't offer Debian guarantees. Offering a paid service when nobody asked is the very definition of an ad.
- BurningPenguin 4y ago
mkl95 4y ago
I had a love/relationship with Ubuntu until 20.04. It broke too easily and too often. Canonical have improved the system quite a bit since the early / mid 1x releases, and these days I really enjoy it. I can take an ad or two in exchange for that.
simula67 4y ago
I think with Pacman finally supporting parallel downloads the last major technical advantage that Debian based distros had over Arch is now gone. I think it is time that Arch is considered as a serious base for more projects.
- yakubin 4y ago
  One thing Arch is never going to have is smooth unattended upgrades. I host a web server on a Debian-based VPS and, aside from updates between releases every couple years, I don’t need to ever bother myself with keeping it up-to-date. It’s done automatically. On Arch you’re expected to read Arch news before updating and apply manual steps when needed.
  - tovej 4y ago
    The opposite has been my experience. I think the rolling nature of Arch has really ironed out the kinks in their release systems.
    - yakubin 4y ago
      Just this year: https://archlinux.org/news/grub-bootloader-upgrade-and-configuration-incompatibilities/ https://archlinux.org/news/grub-bootloader-upgrade-and-confi... https://archlinux.org/news/wxwidgets-32-update-may-need-manual-intervention/ https://archlinux.org/news/wxwidgets-32-update-may-need-manu... https://archlinux.org/news/keycloak-1701-2-update-requires-manual-reconfiguration/ https://archlinux.org/news/keycloak-1701-2-update-requires-m... I’ve been running Debian with unattended updates enabled for 5+ years now and never needed to manually intervene after an update. You wouldn’t put pacman -Syu in cron.
      - an-unknown 4y ago
        And which of these announcements really required manual intervention on a VPS running a webserver? A webserver clearly doesn't use a GUI library like wxwidgets, probably won't run keycloak, and the GRUB change depends on your environment, with good chances that it will still work without re-writing the bootloader. In any case, just subscribe to the arch announcements mailing list and you'll get an email notification in these cases. Not sure if I would put pacman -Syu into cron though.
zecg 4y ago
Just kill motd, it's a hanger-on from time when your friendly admin would leave messages for you to find upon login.
- m4lvin 4y ago
  This is not coming from motd, but part of the apt output.
devmor 4y ago
Yeah I don't see the issue here. It's not a 3rd party service, I see this as no different than say, an NPM package asking for supporters when you install it.
cardanome 4y ago
For those who are fed up with Ubuntu but still want a more user-friendly out-of-the-box experience than stock Debian: Linux Mint. It basically removes the bad parts of Ubuntu while offering a delightful choice of easy to use DEs.
Netcob 4y ago
My mail server admin interface tells me I need to update two packages: 1. Try Ubuntu Pro beta with a free personal subscription on up to 5 machines. 2. Learn more at https://ubuntu.com/pro https://ubuntu.com/pro At least it didn't crash! Displaying ads is one thing, breaking interfaces for something as important as package management doesn't look good.
- SahAssar 4y ago
  apt famously does not have a stable cli interface. It says so in warnings when you use it in non-interactive mode.
  - yencabulator 4y ago
    The batch mode is the older apt-get, that predates the `apt` attempt of cleaning up the UI. Yes, it's silly, and horribly neglected.
q-base 4y ago
I cannot see this as annoying enough to force a change for me. For me everything just works with Ubuntu. I have an X1 Carbon Gen 9 and I have had zero issues with it so far. If I were to change I should somehow be convinced that the other distribution would work as well. I really see it as a direct replacement for Windows or Mac - which for me is a compliment. Every once in a while I contemplate switching - like when Ubuntu is discussed on HN - but I have yet to see the clear argument in favor of other distributions for desktop usage.
Roark66 4y ago
I'm pretty happy I switched to arch (with brief use of guix system) after the push for snaps. The slowness of snaps, the compatibility issues etc annoyed me sufficiently to switch. Having had bad experience with snaps I thought all those app packaging options are similarly flawed. So I wasn't very hopeful to try vscodium(vscode minus Microsoft) as a flatpak on guix. However, it run surprisingly well. I still dislike flatpak polluting my list of mount points and running a bunch of services for one app, but at least from the typical user side it responds fast. It is fast to start and the only compatibility issue I encountered is that python scripts run from vscodium(vscode) can't access cuda for some reason. I loved the idea of a well curated modernised version of Debian that contains recent packages and is stable. Unfortunately canonical made too many mistakes in its execution of the idea.
RealAlexClay 4y ago
I don't see anything nothing wrong with privacy-respecting ads, no matter their format. They can be pop-ups or must-view ads like those on Youtube, for all I care.
rglullis 4y ago
I was using xubuntu over a decade, but after they switched the focus away from the desktop, I moved to Debian as the base and installed home-manager to setup my desktop and personal packages. Never looked back.
Harry__ 4y ago
This came up on the Ubuntu subreddit a few days ago, and it seems the feature strayed from its original intent. There's been a Launchpad bug filed. https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/xxafiu/how_to_remove_advertisements_from_apt/irb5uhb/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/xxafiu/how_to_remov... https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-advantage-tools/+bug/1992026 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-advantage-t...
ianai 4y ago
Here’s the deal. Pay for your software or someone else will. If you use FOSS then donate or the developer might have to pivot into adware. Or abandonware. If the HN crowd can’t afford to financially support the FOSS they use then who will? You’re a huge group of SV types. Probably amongst the top representation of shareholders in some of the most valuable companies on the planet. Feel shame if you’re not supporting the tech ecosystem supporting your literal bottom line. Or show that you’re an actual entrepreneur/capitalist and provide the pricey RH style support of whatever it is and make it official.
- austinjp 4y ago
  While I fully agree with the sentiment here, paying or donating doesn't necessarily prevent ads. Some software and entertainment providers just jam ads into everything, even for paying customers. But yes, I do agree that paying for FOSS should be the norm, where possible. And hopefully this will indeed prevent ads in many cases. It's a shame that advertising has become so normalised that is reflexively added to so many fledgling projects. Most startups fail, but there are always others being born in their place, churning out more ads into the gap. Another niggle, which is admittedly at a tangent from what I took as your main point. Not everyone in the "HN crowd" is in a position to donate. Recently I read a comment here from someone who said they're homeless, for example. But for those HNers who are employed, yes, donation to FOSS should be far more common.
  - ianai 4y ago
    If there’s money in forking a project that just added advertisement solely to remove the ads and take donations away then there’s an avenue of counterbalance. And of course there’s an inappropriate audience to my original comment. That’s life. Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33175839 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33175839
  - ttymck 4y ago
    > Some software and entertainment providers just jam ads into everything, even for paying customers. Sorry, but who are you referring to?
not_the_fda 4y ago
Oh the humanity. Seriously, the outrage over this is ridiculous. This is nothing compared to what Apple, Microsoft, and Google do. Ubuntu is a great distro and makes some reasonable tradeoffs on usability. Debian is great but you have to be sure to grab the hidden installer with the needed firmware blobs to make it useful on a modern system. Fedora, also great, but you have to muck around to get your media codecs installed, and ZFS is a pain to setup on it. Arch, is well Arch, you use it because you like to fiddle with your system.
- modzu 4y ago
  the outrage is precisely because of what apple, microsoft and google do. we must defend linux and it's philosophy because it could easily not exist. as far as other distros go, if you're a beginner, Ubuntu and this prompt on apt notwithstanding, is still totally fine. there are other decent Debian derivates: popos probably serves beginners better than Ubuntu.
- cylon13 4y ago
  I use arch and I don’t like fiddling with my system, I just wanted something light. After the painful initial install a few years ago it’s been really stable on the laptop I used to run xubuntu on. I switched because I was having problems with ubuntu running stuff I didn’t care about in the background and eating up CPU time.
modzu 4y ago
specifically on the subject of package mangers, need to praise fedora. compared to apt, dnf is a relevation
TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
I ran Linux on the desktop (and LOTS of servers) for 19 years, starting with Slackware in 1994. I spent multiple years on each of RedHat, SuSE, Gentoo, and Ubuntu. (I tried Debian only briefly.) I keep a wary eye on Apple, and the possibility of moving back to Linux, in the back of my mind. "I'm gettin' too old" for Gentoo or Arch. As proper, paid, commercial distros, I would consider RedHat or SuSE before Ubuntu these days (especially RedHat, because they're still heavily involved in kernel development), but I haven't seen anyone on this thread suggesting them as the alternative. Why is it all Debian?
- nix23 4y ago
  Rhel9 is great and free for up to 16 instances..yes for production too..and no prob for the workstation with the epel and rpmfusion repos added. SElinux is mostly why i use rhel based system's. But debian, fedora, nix and arch are great too...like all originals.
- yabones 4y ago
  Debian is great for desktop, I've been using 'stable' for about 3 years (Buster and currently Bullseye) with nothing but good experiences. It's basically all the good things about Linux without any of the nonsense unless you specifically opt in. You usually get "older" versions of packages on Stable (less so on Testing/Unstable), but you can also use Flatpak (or Appimage or even Snapd) to get 'current' versions of things. The only difficult thing with Debian is hardware support, but they're working to improve that. Future point-releases of Bullseye and the next Bookworm release will include non-free firmware by default, with the choice to opt out. You can also use non-free drivers and software by opting into the "contrib" and "non-free" repositories.
  - BrotherBisquick 4y ago
    I've experimented with the idea of running Debian stable and using flatpaks+appimages on top of it, but I quickly discovered that those formats are really only for GUI apps. That's fine for getting the latest version of Firefox, but you (apparently) can't flatpak, say, your shell. I'm thinking specificially of Fish, which I need the latest version of at all times because it's constantly changing and I've grown used to the latest features added to it. I know there are backports, but those are available at the whim of individual maintainers, and aren't guaranteed to be present. There's also the possibility of running testing or unstable, but it's more straightforward to just install a rolling release distro rather than installing Debian stable and then dist-upgrading. I have great respect for Debian and if I had to use it on the Desktop I would be happy with it, but for me, in 2022, it just makes more sense to use a rolling release distro.
bravetraveler 4y ago
I guess they missed microk8s, snap, or literally anything else canonical has done I'm no fan of Ubuntu or advertising in general, but advertising their own things is perfectly fine Especially considering it's a tiny text file responsible for this - don't like it, change it.
- anothernewdude 4y ago
  Canonical have been consistent on backing the wrong horse so many times. Mir, Snap, Unity, Amazon integration, Whatever the fuck Ubuntu One was, Ubuntu Software Centre, Upstart, Bazaar. But the worst thing they do, is keep changing where the desktop configuration lives. Every damn release I need to update my script that unfucks their default config to something sane, because they've discovered yet more readline shortcuts to shadow with something irrelevant. Canonical, Fuck you.
pestatije 4y ago
Well, hey...can you not see the Ubuntu logo all over the place? That's advertising and you thought nothing about it.
seieste 4y ago
To fix: Remove /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20apt-esm-hook.conf
stjohnswarts 4y ago
So what? Sounds like a good deal with me. Don't like it, just download debian or arch. I've been using LTS pop_os and ubuntu for years and have been relatively happy with them. I don't really like snap, so I don't complain, and I download flatpak or ppa's that are useful to me. When I start paying for it, I'll start bitching about it and sending nastygrams.
rubyist5eva 4y ago
2 lines of text in the terminal, on an Ubuntu OS for an Ubuntu service - that is free for home users? Linux purists really do get bent out of shape for the most minute things.
reidrac 4y ago
> Ubuntu Pro APT integration is a bit much https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-advantage-tools/+bug/1992026 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-advantage-t...
pxc 4y ago
Ubuntu's path to success in the cloud was building an audience of kids, students, and experimenters of other kinds who went on to work in IT and software development later in their lives/careers. When they had choices of what to deploy, they saw that what they 'grew up with' was available and had comprehensive support, and they gladly went for it. Maybe Ubuntu/Canonical's position is secure at this point, having cemented themselves as a major brand on the popular cloud environments, in WSL, and as the de facto target platform for popular proprietary software (e.g., Steam, Discord, Slack, Google Chrome, VS Code) among GNU/Linux distributions. But things like embedding ads in APT, the telemetry once built into Unity, and pushing an immature implementation of a containerized app platform with a proprietary repository backend (Snap) have made Ubuntu harder and harder to distinguish— culturally— from the corporate, pushy, stifling, restrictive desktop operating systems available from Microsoft and Apple. Ubuntu is still worlds apart from either of course. But it's no longer the breath of fresh air it once was, in comparison to them. At the same time, Ubuntu no longer stands out as miles ahead in terms of usability or newbie-friendliness. And so for the next generation of tinkerers experimenting with Linux (who might yet become the next generation of Linux developers and Linux sysadmins), Ubuntu has already been largely displaced (chiefly by user-friendly/OOTBE-oriented downstreams of Arch, as it happens) in that place of discovery, experimentation, and pleasure at home. It's not that Ubuntu is a horrible catastrophe all of a sudden. It's that when you've been using a suffocating corporate product for your operating system for your entire life, using an operating system that isn't a product at all is a bit stunning once you realize what you're looking at, like those photos of Pyongyang where advertisements are banned and the bus stops are instead decorated with paintings and photos of natural landscapes. In its early years, Ubuntu still felt like that, despite Canonical's (shifting) hopes for it. I don't know what I hope for in relation to all this, exactly, but I know for sure that if I were growing up learning Linux/Unix/FOSS today, I'd have no interest in Ubuntu.
2devnull 4y ago
Seems pretty tame compared to the Amazon shopping lens thing they did, what’s it been like a decade ago iirc. Seems like this will be even easier to fix.

221 points by reidrac 4y ago

I've noticed this. That and the apparent decreased stability of the environment on Ubuntu has led me to start looking at possible replacements.

atemerev 4y ago
I've switched to Fedora a few years ago, and quite happy about that.
creshal 4y ago
Debian for servers that need to run unattended for years, Arch for everything else.
NexRebular 4y ago
One of the BSDs or illumos

kstenerud 4y ago

This and other things (example: snap) have led me to switch back to Debian, which has come a long way on the user side in the past decade!

steeleduncan 4y ago
I've had a similar experience. Most of the little irritations that induced me to switch to Ubuntu have been solved in the base Debian distro. Some of Ubuntu's default settings are still a little more user friendly, but it is really not hard to fix them, certainly less irksome to me than seeing ads on my CLI.
solarkraft 4y ago
This is it. Debian is like Ubuntu but without all the cruft. ... and with older packages, but that's usually okay. Reject ads in your shell, return to Debian.
- planede 4y ago
  > and with older packages, but that's usually okay Just use sid/unstable. Debian really did a disservice for naming it "unstable". Don't use "testing".
  - tovej 4y ago
    Eh, I had the C++ standard library break on unstable a year ago. That's not really acceptable, I'd say unstable is a fair name. There's a few system-breaking changes a year, e.g. gnuplot broke last month.
- xamolxix 4y ago
  > Debian is like Ubuntu but without all the cruft. Unfortunately for me, I only seem to like the font rendering in Ubuntu, any other distro I tried (and I habitually try lots) don't seem to get it quite right (for my taste anyway).
creshal 4y ago
My only gripe with Debian is the "we do support systemd, but not really, but also we don't fully support not using it, so all packages are an eldritch abomination of systemd services loading initscripts loading systemd services loading initscripts" situation that keeps making service debugging harder than it has any right to be.

hericium 4y ago

When most of the IT world was hiding OS and software names from leaking from prompts, pre-login banners etc, Canonical was injecting "Ubuntu" string into every such place imaginable to advertise their distro.

CSDude 4y ago

To be honest, I'd not be too bothered by that specific ad. Hoever, I gave up using Ubuntu long ago with the push for snap applications and all the mayhem it caused. * Oh, you want to install a package, here are two very distant versions in snap and apt. Select one! * Oh you selected snap, sorry now all program starts are slow now because we need to mount compressed disk for sandboxing. * Oh, this snap does not support sandboxing, here install with --classic flag. I use macOS daily, but when I need Linux, I use Arch btw (meme) but seriously it's much more clear.

intelVISA 4y ago
Snap did it for me tbh
anthropodie 4y ago
Moved to debian after using Ubuntu for a decade and I am not looking back. But I think Ubuntu was necessary for me to see beauty of Debian.
- miroljub 4y ago
  Do you use Debian as a desktop? Would it be possible to switch from Ubuntu to Debian without having to reinstall the whole system? I hope something like updating sources to debian unstable and doing apt-get upgrade should just work, but am afraid to try it on the running system.
  - watashiato 4y ago
    It can be done, but don't attempt this unless you're ready to fix a ton of tiny problems all over the place. Backup your data and move it over to a fresh installation instead.
  - GlacierFox 4y ago
    No, absolutely not. Although people colloquially refer to Ubuntu as Debian with a little stuff sprinkled on top, parts of the underlying architecture are fundamentally different. Here's a video of someone giving it a go. (Doesn't even boot) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4dD_cbV5aw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4dD_cbV5aw

noobermin 4y ago

So I upvoted expecting the worst, but this isn't that bad. The only thing I'd be worried about is canonical selling ads to third parties in terminal, then yes, fuck that. EDIT: stuff like this isn't that new. GNU Parallel has that infamous "cite me in your work" long ramble every time you invoked it until you used a flag claiming you'd cite them. This is an ad which makes it commercial may be, potentially raising a different level of ickyness at least in some people's minds, but it definitely is of the same kind of behavior. At the very least, if you're paying canonical, that shouldn't be there.

hericium 4y ago
So everything free should be filled with ads? Even FOSS?
- chrisseaton 4y ago
  Who said ‘should’? If that’s what the creators want what business is it of yours?
  - hericium 4y ago
    > If that’s what the creators want what business is it of yours? Of course - users must want exactly what creators want and products are created by creators for creators.
    - chrisseaton 4y ago
      People create what they want to create. If it’s not what you wanted that’s your problem not theirs.
  - ThunderSizzle 4y ago
    Users aren't required to use it either
    - chrisseaton 4y ago

thefz 4y ago

I don't care honestly, and we have the option to disable the motd anyway. It's all to sponsor a free program to extend the security of some machines. Ubuntu has done more good than harm to open source adoption.

hericium 4y ago
It's an apt output, not motd.
- creshal 4y ago
  What a time to be alive: Canonical is putting so many different ads into Ubuntu that people confuse them when they're telling you it's nothing to worry about.
  - nirimda 4y ago
    Well at least they're taking their own advice, if the worry about it so little that they don't even know where the ads they aren't worried about are showing.

perihelions 4y ago

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4558049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4558049 ("Ubuntu Will Now Have Amazon Ads Pre-Installed", 2012)

lapser 4y ago
How is this related? This was a) 10 years ago, b) nothing to do with injecting it in a cli, and c) in this instance Canonical is advertising their own product, within their own product, compared to the original where Amazon paid Canonical to advertise for them.
drooopy 4y ago
They are only related in the sense that both involve Ubuntu Linux.

CGamesPlay 4y ago

When most people think "ad", they think that third parties are collecting data about the computer or user attached to it, and then those third parties respond with a bid and an ad. (Maybe this is done real-time like on the web these days, maybe in advance based on demographics and surveys like on TV.) But this is just self-promotion (the second-party is showing this), and not targeted (the second party didn't collect any signal to decide what ad to show). So yes, possibly annoying that a commercial Linux distro is trying to advertise their commercial products, but hardly nefarious.

benj111 4y ago
No, but the thing is about the shell is you can automate it, so random stuff could break shell scripts. Plus if I wanted random companies marketing things to me I'd use Windows.
- Denvercoder9 4y ago
  > No, but the thing is about the shell is you can automate it, so random stuff could break shell scripts. In this particular case, the user used the "apt" command, which is meant to be used by humans and not by scripts. It's explicitly documented that its output is unstable, and prints out a warning when stdout is not an interactive tty. For scripting, use of the apt-get/apt-cache/etc tools is recommended.
  - nirimda 4y ago
    Fwiw, it's included in the output of `apt-get dist-upgrade`, so using `apt-get` is not going to immunise you from unnecessarily patching scripts that break.
kstenerud 4y ago
When most people think "ad", they think of injecting an attempt to sell you something into an environment where it would not naturally occur, pulling your attention away from what you were doing (commercials, billboards, web pages, magazines, command line tools, MOTDs, books - oh wait they don't do it there yet).

kar1181 4y ago

Getting ready to be acquired by Microsoft I guess. I've spent a lot of time with Ubuntu it's been a faithful friend for so long but I do wonder what the 10+ year roadmap looks like for Canonical and maybe this is an indication.

tux2bsd 4y ago

intelVISA 4y ago

Ubuntu is basically Windows-lite nowadays sadly w/ the new direction by Canonical & friends; I quite liked the distro but I've had to become an "Arch btw" kinda person now.

hef19898 4y ago
That 's strange, just updated to latest version, 20.22 or something, and didn't get any promp whatsoever, upgrades run painlessly, including Lenovo stuff. Until now, I wasn't even aware ther was a pro version of it...
- tryauuum 4y ago
  latest version is probably 22.10
  - intelVISA 4y ago
    Ubuntu 11 now with Windows (Telemetry) Subsystem for Canonical plus GNU/Linux
  - hef19898 4y ago
    22.04, coming from 20.04, if looked up correctly. So from Fosa something to something Jellyfish. Only thing that doesn't work anymore is that darktable lost a lens profile of one of my older lenses. Pretty sure so that this has nothing to do with Ubuntu so, and the profiles of the newer ones work perfectly fine as well.

atemerev 4y ago

Fedora is now my distro of choice for most of purposes. It is also well supported, easily upgraded between releases, and do not have this sort of pushing things down the throat as of yet.

petepete 4y ago
Fedora nails the basics. Nice installer, unadulterated GNOME, well-stocked official repos and easy to add third party ones. That's all I want these days. The only negative thing I have to say about my day to day Linux use is caused by Nvidia's shitty driver and power management issues. My next build will be AMD (or maybe Intel) graphics.
- atemerev 4y ago
  Nvidia works fine for me (even with Wayland) since Fedora 36 (the latest). With X, it worked fine since ages. I am a researcher and simulations developer, so I can't live without CUDA.
  - petepete 4y ago
    For the most part it works for me, but there are some definite rough edges. For example, I had to disable suspend because sometimes it doesn't wake properly. I need to reboot to make it work again. The fact I needed to enable a bunch of services (nvidia-suspend.service and friends) to even get it to sleep was enough of a pain. I'm running a 1660 GTX so it's not like I have a niche card with special functionality or anything, it's very run-of-the-mill. Compared to my laptop (ThinkPad), where everything just worked, it's a chore. I set up a (Beelink) computer for my parents with AMD graphics and it's been flawless for the past year, I've not even had to do any tech support in that time.
christophilus 4y ago
Yeah. Fedora is my favorite. I like Debian and Arch, and am philosophically more aligned with community-driven projects like those. But Fedora hits the sweet spot, so I’m using it until IBM royally screws it up.

stevewatson301 4y ago

I don't get the outrage. I don't see people say similar things when authors display "sponsor my work on OpenCollective/Github Sponsors" through messages on npm install and the like. A simple text notification offering a paid service for an otherwise free OSS software is really pushing the definition of what an "ad" is.

input_sh 4y ago
It's not even paid, at least not for personal use. From the website: > Anyone can use Ubuntu Pro for free on up to 5 machines, or 50 if you are an official Ubuntu Community member. From what I can tell it's LTS but with double support (10 years instead of 5).
Arnavion 4y ago
>I don't see people say similar things when authors display "sponsor my work on OpenCollective/Github Sponsors" through messages on npm install and the like. People did say similar things about that. It was a big shitshow. https://www.zdnet.com/article/npm-bans-terminal-ads/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/npm-bans-terminal-ads/ And even if you don't count donation requests as ads, the article mentions those too: >The upcoming change will allow developers to silence any type of non-error terminal messages, such as ads, or calls for donations -- an issue many times more widespread[1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] than Funding's ads ever were. Those are all links to people complaining about donation requests.
rroot 4y ago
>notification offering a paid service I think a "notification offering a paid service" could be pretty good definition of an ad, certainly no "pushing the definition" in that.
denton-scratch 4y ago
The packages installed by npm install are not Debian packages, and don't offer Debian guarantees. Offering a paid service when nobody asked is the very definition of an ad.
BurningPenguin 4y ago

mkl95 4y ago

I had a love/relationship with Ubuntu until 20.04. It broke too easily and too often. Canonical have improved the system quite a bit since the early / mid 1x releases, and these days I really enjoy it. I can take an ad or two in exchange for that.

simula67 4y ago

I think with Pacman finally supporting parallel downloads the last major technical advantage that Debian based distros had over Arch is now gone. I think it is time that Arch is considered as a serious base for more projects.

yakubin 4y ago
One thing Arch is never going to have is smooth unattended upgrades. I host a web server on a Debian-based VPS and, aside from updates between releases every couple years, I don’t need to ever bother myself with keeping it up-to-date. It’s done automatically. On Arch you’re expected to read Arch news before updating and apply manual steps when needed.
- tovej 4y ago
  The opposite has been my experience. I think the rolling nature of Arch has really ironed out the kinks in their release systems.
  - yakubin 4y ago
    Just this year: https://archlinux.org/news/grub-bootloader-upgrade-and-configuration-incompatibilities/ https://archlinux.org/news/grub-bootloader-upgrade-and-confi... https://archlinux.org/news/wxwidgets-32-update-may-need-manual-intervention/ https://archlinux.org/news/wxwidgets-32-update-may-need-manu... https://archlinux.org/news/keycloak-1701-2-update-requires-manual-reconfiguration/ https://archlinux.org/news/keycloak-1701-2-update-requires-m... I’ve been running Debian with unattended updates enabled for 5+ years now and never needed to manually intervene after an update. You wouldn’t put pacman -Syu in cron.
    - an-unknown 4y ago
      And which of these announcements really required manual intervention on a VPS running a webserver? A webserver clearly doesn't use a GUI library like wxwidgets, probably won't run keycloak, and the GRUB change depends on your environment, with good chances that it will still work without re-writing the bootloader. In any case, just subscribe to the arch announcements mailing list and you'll get an email notification in these cases. Not sure if I would put pacman -Syu into cron though.

zecg 4y ago

Just kill motd, it's a hanger-on from time when your friendly admin would leave messages for you to find upon login.

m4lvin 4y ago
This is not coming from motd, but part of the apt output.

devmor 4y ago

Yeah I don't see the issue here. It's not a 3rd party service, I see this as no different than say, an NPM package asking for supporters when you install it.

cardanome 4y ago

For those who are fed up with Ubuntu but still want a more user-friendly out-of-the-box experience than stock Debian: Linux Mint. It basically removes the bad parts of Ubuntu while offering a delightful choice of easy to use DEs.

Netcob 4y ago

My mail server admin interface tells me I need to update two packages: 1. Try Ubuntu Pro beta with a free personal subscription on up to 5 machines. 2. Learn more at https://ubuntu.com/pro https://ubuntu.com/pro At least it didn't crash! Displaying ads is one thing, breaking interfaces for something as important as package management doesn't look good.

SahAssar 4y ago
apt famously does not have a stable cli interface. It says so in warnings when you use it in non-interactive mode.
- yencabulator 4y ago
  The batch mode is the older apt-get, that predates the `apt` attempt of cleaning up the UI. Yes, it's silly, and horribly neglected.

q-base 4y ago

I cannot see this as annoying enough to force a change for me. For me everything just works with Ubuntu. I have an X1 Carbon Gen 9 and I have had zero issues with it so far. If I were to change I should somehow be convinced that the other distribution would work as well. I really see it as a direct replacement for Windows or Mac - which for me is a compliment. Every once in a while I contemplate switching - like when Ubuntu is discussed on HN - but I have yet to see the clear argument in favor of other distributions for desktop usage.

Roark66 4y ago

I'm pretty happy I switched to arch (with brief use of guix system) after the push for snaps. The slowness of snaps, the compatibility issues etc annoyed me sufficiently to switch. Having had bad experience with snaps I thought all those app packaging options are similarly flawed. So I wasn't very hopeful to try vscodium(vscode minus Microsoft) as a flatpak on guix. However, it run surprisingly well. I still dislike flatpak polluting my list of mount points and running a bunch of services for one app, but at least from the typical user side it responds fast. It is fast to start and the only compatibility issue I encountered is that python scripts run from vscodium(vscode) can't access cuda for some reason. I loved the idea of a well curated modernised version of Debian that contains recent packages and is stable. Unfortunately canonical made too many mistakes in its execution of the idea.

RealAlexClay 4y ago

I don't see anything nothing wrong with privacy-respecting ads, no matter their format. They can be pop-ups or must-view ads like those on Youtube, for all I care.

rglullis 4y ago

I was using xubuntu over a decade, but after they switched the focus away from the desktop, I moved to Debian as the base and installed home-manager to setup my desktop and personal packages. Never looked back.

Harry__ 4y ago

This came up on the Ubuntu subreddit a few days ago, and it seems the feature strayed from its original intent. There's been a Launchpad bug filed. https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/xxafiu/how_to_remove_advertisements_from_apt/irb5uhb/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/xxafiu/how_to_remov... https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-advantage-tools/+bug/1992026 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-advantage-t...

ianai 4y ago

Here’s the deal. Pay for your software or someone else will. If you use FOSS then donate or the developer might have to pivot into adware. Or abandonware. If the HN crowd can’t afford to financially support the FOSS they use then who will? You’re a huge group of SV types. Probably amongst the top representation of shareholders in some of the most valuable companies on the planet. Feel shame if you’re not supporting the tech ecosystem supporting your literal bottom line. Or show that you’re an actual entrepreneur/capitalist and provide the pricey RH style support of whatever it is and make it official.

austinjp 4y ago
While I fully agree with the sentiment here, paying or donating doesn't necessarily prevent ads. Some software and entertainment providers just jam ads into everything, even for paying customers. But yes, I do agree that paying for FOSS should be the norm, where possible. And hopefully this will indeed prevent ads in many cases. It's a shame that advertising has become so normalised that is reflexively added to so many fledgling projects. Most startups fail, but there are always others being born in their place, churning out more ads into the gap. Another niggle, which is admittedly at a tangent from what I took as your main point. Not everyone in the "HN crowd" is in a position to donate. Recently I read a comment here from someone who said they're homeless, for example. But for those HNers who are employed, yes, donation to FOSS should be far more common.
- ianai 4y ago
  If there’s money in forking a project that just added advertisement solely to remove the ads and take donations away then there’s an avenue of counterbalance. And of course there’s an inappropriate audience to my original comment. That’s life. Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33175839 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33175839
- ttymck 4y ago
  > Some software and entertainment providers just jam ads into everything, even for paying customers. Sorry, but who are you referring to?

not_the_fda 4y ago

Oh the humanity. Seriously, the outrage over this is ridiculous. This is nothing compared to what Apple, Microsoft, and Google do. Ubuntu is a great distro and makes some reasonable tradeoffs on usability. Debian is great but you have to be sure to grab the hidden installer with the needed firmware blobs to make it useful on a modern system. Fedora, also great, but you have to muck around to get your media codecs installed, and ZFS is a pain to setup on it. Arch, is well Arch, you use it because you like to fiddle with your system.

modzu 4y ago
the outrage is precisely because of what apple, microsoft and google do. we must defend linux and it's philosophy because it could easily not exist. as far as other distros go, if you're a beginner, Ubuntu and this prompt on apt notwithstanding, is still totally fine. there are other decent Debian derivates: popos probably serves beginners better than Ubuntu.
cylon13 4y ago
I use arch and I don’t like fiddling with my system, I just wanted something light. After the painful initial install a few years ago it’s been really stable on the laptop I used to run xubuntu on. I switched because I was having problems with ubuntu running stuff I didn’t care about in the background and eating up CPU time.

modzu 4y ago

specifically on the subject of package mangers, need to praise fedora. compared to apt, dnf is a relevation

TheRealDunkirk 4y ago

I ran Linux on the desktop (and LOTS of servers) for 19 years, starting with Slackware in 1994. I spent multiple years on each of RedHat, SuSE, Gentoo, and Ubuntu. (I tried Debian only briefly.) I keep a wary eye on Apple, and the possibility of moving back to Linux, in the back of my mind. "I'm gettin' too old" for Gentoo or Arch. As proper, paid, commercial distros, I would consider RedHat or SuSE before Ubuntu these days (especially RedHat, because they're still heavily involved in kernel development), but I haven't seen anyone on this thread suggesting them as the alternative. Why is it all Debian?

nix23 4y ago
Rhel9 is great and free for up to 16 instances..yes for production too..and no prob for the workstation with the epel and rpmfusion repos added. SElinux is mostly why i use rhel based system's. But debian, fedora, nix and arch are great too...like all originals.
yabones 4y ago
Debian is great for desktop, I've been using 'stable' for about 3 years (Buster and currently Bullseye) with nothing but good experiences. It's basically all the good things about Linux without any of the nonsense unless you specifically opt in. You usually get "older" versions of packages on Stable (less so on Testing/Unstable), but you can also use Flatpak (or Appimage or even Snapd) to get 'current' versions of things. The only difficult thing with Debian is hardware support, but they're working to improve that. Future point-releases of Bullseye and the next Bookworm release will include non-free firmware by default, with the choice to opt out. You can also use non-free drivers and software by opting into the "contrib" and "non-free" repositories.
- BrotherBisquick 4y ago
  I've experimented with the idea of running Debian stable and using flatpaks+appimages on top of it, but I quickly discovered that those formats are really only for GUI apps. That's fine for getting the latest version of Firefox, but you (apparently) can't flatpak, say, your shell. I'm thinking specificially of Fish, which I need the latest version of at all times because it's constantly changing and I've grown used to the latest features added to it. I know there are backports, but those are available at the whim of individual maintainers, and aren't guaranteed to be present. There's also the possibility of running testing or unstable, but it's more straightforward to just install a rolling release distro rather than installing Debian stable and then dist-upgrading. I have great respect for Debian and if I had to use it on the Desktop I would be happy with it, but for me, in 2022, it just makes more sense to use a rolling release distro.

bravetraveler 4y ago

I guess they missed microk8s, snap, or literally anything else canonical has done I'm no fan of Ubuntu or advertising in general, but advertising their own things is perfectly fine Especially considering it's a tiny text file responsible for this - don't like it, change it.

anothernewdude 4y ago
Canonical have been consistent on backing the wrong horse so many times. Mir, Snap, Unity, Amazon integration, Whatever the fuck Ubuntu One was, Ubuntu Software Centre, Upstart, Bazaar. But the worst thing they do, is keep changing where the desktop configuration lives. Every damn release I need to update my script that unfucks their default config to something sane, because they've discovered yet more readline shortcuts to shadow with something irrelevant. Canonical, Fuck you.

pestatije 4y ago

Well, hey...can you not see the Ubuntu logo all over the place? That's advertising and you thought nothing about it.

seieste 4y ago

To fix: Remove /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20apt-esm-hook.conf

stjohnswarts 4y ago

So what? Sounds like a good deal with me. Don't like it, just download debian or arch. I've been using LTS pop_os and ubuntu for years and have been relatively happy with them. I don't really like snap, so I don't complain, and I download flatpak or ppa's that are useful to me. When I start paying for it, I'll start bitching about it and sending nastygrams.

rubyist5eva 4y ago

2 lines of text in the terminal, on an Ubuntu OS for an Ubuntu service - that is free for home users? Linux purists really do get bent out of shape for the most minute things.

reidrac 4y ago

> Ubuntu Pro APT integration is a bit much https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-advantage-tools/+bug/1992026 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubuntu-advantage-t...

pxc 4y ago

Ubuntu's path to success in the cloud was building an audience of kids, students, and experimenters of other kinds who went on to work in IT and software development later in their lives/careers. When they had choices of what to deploy, they saw that what they 'grew up with' was available and had comprehensive support, and they gladly went for it. Maybe Ubuntu/Canonical's position is secure at this point, having cemented themselves as a major brand on the popular cloud environments, in WSL, and as the de facto target platform for popular proprietary software (e.g., Steam, Discord, Slack, Google Chrome, VS Code) among GNU/Linux distributions. But things like embedding ads in APT, the telemetry once built into Unity, and pushing an immature implementation of a containerized app platform with a proprietary repository backend (Snap) have made Ubuntu harder and harder to distinguish— culturally— from the corporate, pushy, stifling, restrictive desktop operating systems available from Microsoft and Apple. Ubuntu is still worlds apart from either of course. But it's no longer the breath of fresh air it once was, in comparison to them. At the same time, Ubuntu no longer stands out as miles ahead in terms of usability or newbie-friendliness. And so for the next generation of tinkerers experimenting with Linux (who might yet become the next generation of Linux developers and Linux sysadmins), Ubuntu has already been largely displaced (chiefly by user-friendly/OOTBE-oriented downstreams of Arch, as it happens) in that place of discovery, experimentation, and pleasure at home. It's not that Ubuntu is a horrible catastrophe all of a sudden. It's that when you've been using a suffocating corporate product for your operating system for your entire life, using an operating system that isn't a product at all is a bit stunning once you realize what you're looking at, like those photos of Pyongyang where advertisements are banned and the bus stops are instead decorated with paintings and photos of natural landscapes. In its early years, Ubuntu still felt like that, despite Canonical's (shifting) hopes for it. I don't know what I hope for in relation to all this, exactly, but I know for sure that if I were growing up learning Linux/Unix/FOSS today, I'd have no interest in Ubuntu.

2devnull 4y ago

Seems pretty tame compared to the Amazon shopping lens thing they did, what’s it been like a decade ago iirc. Seems like this will be even easier to fix.