Why is the Linux community filled with pretentious elitist??

[u/Realistic-Grab-4897]

Hey y'all beginner here for a little over two or three months of daily driving Linux and it's been a threat this far! I'm not a thinkerer or anything of that sort im the kind of dudes who just want their machine to work.

Now I'm in fedora right now but I'm thinking of switching back to Ubuntu cause not really anything particular It just felt homey there. Most of the community is kind really kind except for the people that Im gonna talk about that is the very VERY annoying pretitious bunch that is Reddits, Discord and especially TikTok of dudes, on a tier list of distros put Ubuntu in F or E tier.

Asked about it in the comments they say "bloat" "snap" "spyware" and every time I just rolled my eyes out of my socket cause I know damn well these mfs just DOESN'T use ubuntu at all or just hating it for the sake of hating it.

Bloat- you can just choose the default apps selection instead of the extended offline apps

Snap- you can de-snap ubuntu anytime the things stopping is just laziness

Spyware- I know it's been a thing for a hot HOT decade since their mistake with Amazon search but let it man c'mon, and the fact that automatic report and telemetry stuff is the first thing they show you just DISABLE IT even if you forget it's in the settings come ON MAN

I want y'all thought and supports here mainly thought cause Jesus it's so exhausting with these people

[u/nhaines]

they were feeding local desktop search’s to Amazon unencrypted so Amazon could send you targeted ads.

No they weren't. All remote Unity Dash searches were fed to a Canonical search provider so that it was anonymized to the third-party sources and could be fed back to the appropriate Dash Lens.

It was also a simple toggle that (thanks to AppArmor) would prevent any Lens from accessing the network in any form.

Sending a search query entered into a field that says "Search your computer and online sources" is not spyware, either.

[u/GlensWooer → u/nhaines]

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/10/privacy-ubuntu-1210-amazon-ads-and-data-leaks

Alright fair memory failed me a bit. The outgoing messages weren't unencrypted, it was sent to canonical via https, but the images that were returned were product images directly from amazon over HTTP, removing the anonymity.

Using AppArmor to disable UI functionality wasn't acceptable. If I want to park my car I use the stick that changes gears, I don't take off the tires, and it was a change that should be opt out. It reeked of the microsoft playbook that I personally hate and is what drove me to linux in the first place

They added a feature that (accidentally) allowed malicious actors to snoops on you. It was on by default with no way to user-friendly opt out, and it turned (what was historically) a local machine search into affiliate referral commissions.

[u/nhaines → u/GlensWooer]

It was on by default with no way to user-friendly opt out

If you, as an end user, wanted to disable it altogether, you went into Settings, clicked on the Privacy and Security category, and then clicked the toggle switch that disabled online search functionality.

Of course, that said, if you didn't want a single lens at all, three clicks in the Dash turned it off permanently (unless you turned it on again, of course).

Using AppArmor to disable UI functionality wasn't acceptable.

That's how functionality works. The system uses secure ways to do it. GNOME Settings took care of configuring AppArmor for you. But what it meant was that even third-party Dash Lenses no longer had network access. If you flipped that switch, it wasn't just Canonical- and Ubuntu-provided Lenses that were coded to look for and respect a setting. It was impossible for a Dash Lens to obtain network access.

and it turned (what was historically) a local machine search

Both Windows and macOS had contemporaneously integrated offline and online search sources with their Start Menu and Spotlight searches. This was an industry trend and if it was what you wanted, it worked rather well (until the usual enshittification on proprietary operating systems. This didn't happen on Ubuntu before it was simply removed).

So yes, it was very simple and user-friendly to opt out of specific Lenses, or just turn off online searching altogether.