Ubuntu experimenting with Advertising in Terminal Applications by "hijacking" apt package manager

[AlTech]

Summary

 

Ubuntu, our favourite meme linux distribution that keeps making itself worse for seemingly no reason, has decided to experiment with putting ADs in terminal applications running on Ubuntu. Specifically, Ubuntu is "hijacking" (a term chosen by the Ubuntu users angered by this and OmgUbuntu) the apt package manager to insert advertising when users execute a command using apt.

 

The Advertising in question advertises Canonical's Ubuntu Pro support product which is free for up to 5 devices but costs money for a higher device limit.

 

Quotes

Quote

Yes, the furore is over an “ad” for Ubuntu Pro, Canonical’s revamped support offering that replaces/augments Ubuntu Advantage (which has been around for many years) that appears in the terminal when managing system updates.

Quote

apt isn’t a Canonical product/creation, it’s just something their OS happens to use. To “hijack” (to quote a disgruntled complainant) apt to hawk a service (albeit one which is related to system updating) is a bit… cheeky.

The second cheeky thing is that ‘advertising’ is for a service of most benefit to people using an LTS that’s near the end of its support period. Hassling folks about extended support on a 22.04 LTS system (which gets updates until 2027) is premature, and borderline spammy.

 

My thoughts

If Ubuntu was ever hoping to salvage their reputation and image they're in for a nasty surprise. Before they had their beef with flatpaks, and they injected Amazon ADs into Ubuntu, but not content to disparage their once good name and reputation, they do this and continue putting ADs into Ubuntu; the latest form of which happens to be terminal ADs for some of their own products.

 

I wonder how Debian's APT Team feels about APT being "hijacked" for Ubuntu's purposes on Ubuntu installations. I suspect they're not thrilled by the idea and frankly neither am I.

 

Sources

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2022/10/ubuntu-pro-terminal-ad

[jaslion]

The funny thing is that due to its open source nature one can fork ubuntu and call it noadubuntu or something silly.

 

Thats the fun thing about open source stuff. Make users too pissed and they might just make their own version from the point where you last left off and keep taking all the good improvements whilst removing the bad.

[Lightwreather]

Ah dear 'buntu.

I know you're in need of money, but stepping on a lego would be a better waste of time, 

—Sincerely, OpenSUSE and macOS user.

[LapsedMemory]

19 minutes ago, jaslion said:

The funny thing is that due to its open source nature one can fork ubuntu and call it noadubuntu or something silly.

 

Thats the fun thing about open source stuff. Make users too pissed and they might just make their own version from the point where you last left off and keep taking all the good improvements whilst removing the bad.

Linux Mint has been working on a Debian edition as a way to sidestep their dependency on Ubuntu's architecture.  

Download LMDE 5 - Linux Mint

 

[jagdtigger]

Havent even noticed it until read about it here......   (Not saying its ok.)

[jaslion]

8 minutes ago, LapsedMemory said:

Linux Mint has been working on a Debian edition as a way to sidestep their dependency on Ubuntu's architecture.  

Download LMDE 5 - Linux Mint

 

Or they do that. Also works fine

[suicidalfranco]

meh, will probably be as easy to disable/remove completely as it was with the Amazon integration. It's a nothing burger for me.

[Spart0n]

Honestly like someone else said it'll either be forked with a silly noad name or someone will make an app/package/whatever (I'm not a Linux user yet) that removes or disables it 

[Dracarris]

19 hours ago, jaslion said:

The funny thing is that due to its open source nature one can fork ubuntu and call it noadubuntu or something silly.

Yeah, more fragmentation. Exactly what Linux needs.

[suicidalfranco]

Bug #1992026 “Ubuntu Pro APT integration is a bit much” : Bugs : ubuntu-advantage-tools package : Ubuntu (launchpad.net)

According to this, they get that they messed up, and are working on moving the message to the end of output as opposed to the start, and also providing a command to suppress any Ubuntu Pro output in the apt output.

So: "Aaaand it's gone.jpg"

[Sauron]

 

is this really what people are losing their minds over? It's dishonest to even call this an ad, my first thought was that you'd get random advertisement messages by companies that paid for them while using the package manager but that's not at all what this is. It's just a text banner letting you know that canonical offers extended support if you want it. I guess if given a choice I'd rather not have it but is it really such a big deal?

 

OmgUbuntu even points out how ridiculous this is:

Quote

Thing is, Ubuntu (as a distro) already makes plenty of mention to Ubuntu Pro in the GUI for managing system updates. Is extending this mention to a CLI equivalent really a step too far?

 

here, just add this to your .bashrc if this bugs you:

censoredapt() {
    sudo apt "$@" 2>&1 | grep -v -e "Ubuntu Pro" -e "WARNING: apt does not have a stable CLI interface"
}
alias capt='censoredapt'

and just call capt instead of sudo apt.

[jaslion]

3 hours ago, Dracarris said:

Yeah, more fragmentation. Exactly what Linux needs.

Dont see anything wrong with that. Theres the main couple projects people know and then there are all the unique flavors for people that want em.

 

Basically similar to how those custom versions of windows go but this time its open source software.

 

Its there for the people that want it and the people that dont care just dont care and keep using what they want.

[Dracarris]

19 minutes ago, jaslion said:

Basically similar to how those custom versions of windows go but this time its open source software.

Except that those didn't have any compatibility problems with 3rd-party software or drivers.

[jaslion]

1 minute ago, Dracarris said:

Except that those didn't have any compatibility problems with 3rd-party software or drivers.

Oh they sure do. Lots have big issues

[Dracarris]

2 hours ago, jaslion said:

Oh they sure do. Lots have big issues

yeah Windows in general but not those special versions in comparison to the regular ones..

[jaslion]

10 minutes ago, Dracarris said:

yeah Windows in general but not those special versions in comparison to the regular ones..

They do. Due to removing features a lot of drivers simply dont work. I mean nvidia error 43 is extremly common amongst other common errors.

[Dracarris]

7 hours ago, jaslion said:

They do. Due to removing features a lot of drivers simply dont work. I mean nvidia error 43 is extremly common amongst other common errors.

How would a removed Internet Explorer or Windows Media Player result in a driver error? Even if so, this isn't remotely comparable to the mess with the gazzillion of Linux distributions/forks.

[Eaglerino]

On 10/18/2022 at 7:20 AM, jaslion said:

The funny thing is that due to its open source nature one can fork ubuntu and call it noadubuntu or something silly.

 

Thats the fun thing about open source stuff. Make users too pissed and they might just make their own version from the point where you last left off and keep taking all the good improvements whilst removing the bad.

Also the downfall of open source. Everything gets splintered, and it's just ten times easier to use Windows

[Kisai]

3 hours ago, Eaglerino said:

Also the downfall of open source. Everything gets splintered, and it's just ten times easier to use Windows

Linux Distro's have been splintered pretty much since inception, and that's been the leading reason why it's not used by anyone who matters on the desktop.

 

On servers however, most of the distros used are descendants of Redhat, and we've seen how that gets destroyed (CentOS being brought back into Redhat and then effectively destroying it) which is itself a consequence of IBM acquiring Redhat.

 

What we've learned:

a) we can't trust commercial versions of Linux to not change things, LTS is a lie.

b) we can't trust commercial versions of Linux to update the kernel and userland without stomping on anything

c) we can't trust any Linux package manager to not stomp on everything in userland.

 

Like, in my view, "updates" to the kernel should be an ongoing thing, but adding features that in turn break things should not. It's like a cardinal sin of software development. You're allowed to break something between a major version number update only, you're not allow to remove or depreciate functionality in point patches. But when software does that (php, python and perl all do this) then you can't trust the software at all to not become broken so you end up freezing it in the package manager so it doesn't get updated, and thus security fixes never happen.

 

Linux and OSS tool developers, please stop breaking things. You're not google. You do not have the leverage to force everyone to update the dependency chain and recompile the entire OS because you refactored some functionality in your tool. This is one of the reasons why we don't trust google to not kill a product, because they change things on a whim and offer no long term stability. When a OS distro or a OSS tool suddenly decides they will insert ads, or telemetry tracking, or harass the end user to upgrade to some paid version, that's a line crossed that many people will balk at, and it's enough to switch to a "better" option.

 

Part of the reason why it's so hard to drag people away from Microsoft, Adobe or Autodesk products, is because you're locked into the product, and usually in a forward-upgrade mode only. Nobody wants to learn a new product that works different, and when you throw version-specific quirks into it, you can't even google an answer for it, because google will return the oldest "most popular" answer for the older product that may not apply.

[jagdtigger]

2 hours ago, Kisai said:

you're not allow to remove or depreciate functionality in point patches. But when software does that (php, python

Its a bit unfair to complain here, each point release has several years of support. 3 for php and 5 for python, if a dev cannot keep up with even this slow speed then he/she has bigger issues than broken SW.....

[Kisai]

3 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

Its a bit unfair to complain here, each point release has several years of support. 3 for php and 5 for python, if a dev cannot keep up with even this slow speed then he/she has bigger issues than broken SW.....

Maybe you're missing the problem. The problem is I can't have automatic updates on production hardware because there's possibility of even a point or patch level "update" removing functionality for completely arbitrary reasons, which results in having to totally overhaul every damn dependency. Is it too much to ask to not remove expected functionality?

 

A case example of this is SDL, which all these programs, emulators, games, etc were built on 1.2, 2.x is not backwards compatible. Dosbox ostensibly will not upgrade to 2.0 because it removes the ODD support. Then there is also the problem of 2.x breaking things in all point releases, and thus can't permit the OS to install it (SDL) as a shared library.

 

PHP and Python have removed or changed functionality (PHP has apparently changed how regular expressions worked three times during the 5.x series), better hope your host doesn't use Cpanel, because cpanel will remove old versions of php on top of you.

 

Incidentally AutoCAD, is one of those software programs that will whine-complain-moan about not being in exactly the "supported" configuration. OS, drivers, hardware, etc. You change one bit, and now you're in an unsupported configuration, you're on your own.

[jagdtigger]

12 hours ago, Kisai said:

Maybe you're missing the problem.

I think you are missing the problem here. Each point release has overlapping support which means you have plenty of time to adjust to the changes. And afaik at least for python and PHP it wont auto update between point releases.

[Kisai]

4 hours ago, jagdtigger said:

I think you are missing the problem here. Each point release has overlapping support which means you have plenty of time to adjust to the changes. And afaik at least for python and PHP it wont auto update between point releases.

No. I should not have to change my working code because the developers of the language decided they wanted to change the name of the function and change the parameter order. It's absolutely insane to insist that you should change your code in a production system. If php and python were javascript, every website would be broken every few weeks as google and Microsoft decide to remove javascript functionality and force you to use typescript or compile from something like coffeescript.

 

Or, maybe we need a car analogy. Your assertion is that you should move the fuel cap by rewelding the car, rather than leaving the damn fuel cap alone.

 

[Forbidden Wafer]

On 10/19/2022 at 11:28 PM, Kisai said:

Linux and OSS tool developers, please stop breaking things. You're not google. You do not have the leverage to force everyone to update the dependency chain and recompile the entire OS because you refactored some functionality in your tool. 

Yup. It is a pain. But I totally get it. Being a library maintainer already is a pain in the ass, in most cases nobody pays for support, but at the same time is happy to complain something isn't working quite as they would like. Then you try to fix and they complain something broke in the process.

For end-user applications in general, it is crazy nobody backs AppImage (but is happy to support crappy flathub or snaps). It is the best solution, single drag-and-drop install, single build works across most distros and distro releases. No need to install managing services or new stores.

[jagdtigger]

On 10/21/2022 at 2:01 AM, Kisai said:

Or, maybe we need a car analogy.

I dont need one because im a car electrician. You either keep up with the changes and learn or left behind. But if you are left behind you are done for.....  And i think this pretty much closes this argument.

 

On 10/21/2022 at 2:01 AM, Kisai said:

you should change your code in a production system

Um why would you? Just dont upgrade to the new release until you are ready. In case of PHP when a new release comes out the previous one is still supported for 2 more years.....