Ubuntu is good for privacy?

Software
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I don’t think Canonical’s nearly as important as you make them out to be. Ubuntu is a dying distro struggling to stay relevant. The only people who still like it are people who haven’t used it in over 10 years but remember when it used to be good.

Canonical has advanced the Linux desktop exactly once. Ever since then, it’s been one failure after another. Upstart, Unity, Mir. Add Snap to the list once they finally give up on that.

Even if Canonical has learnt their lesson with the Amazon snafu, why would you take that risk when you’ve got so many other distros to choose from? Distros that don’t have this permanent black mark on their record.

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43

The most important thing that Ubuntu did in my opinion is that it shifted the Linux world from distros based on Red Hat to distros based on Debian.

When I first installed Linux in 1999, everyone was using distros based on rpm (Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake, etc.) and the tools developed by Red Hat. Ubuntu helped make the Debian family the dominant variety of Linux.

I give Canonical a great deal of credit for popularizing Linux on the desktop after the internet crash and Red Hat and SUSE had given up on desktop Linux as not being profitable. Because of Ubuntu, most of the people who learned to use Linux after 2004 learned with Debian tools. I think this important, because it means that the direction of Linux is not controlled by a corporate entity such as IBM/Red Hat or SUSE, but by a community of 3000 volunteers at Debian. Of course, companies like Intel, IBM/Red Hat, Linaro, SUSE, AMD and TI do most of the development work on the kernel, and IBM/Red Hat has a huge amount of control over GTK/GNOME, but we are no longer in a world where a company like Red Hat can harm desktop Linux as it did in 2002 when Red Hat switched to RHEL with high licensing fees and gave up on marketing desktop Linux.

Sadly, Canonical has shifted away from desktop Linux since 2017, so it becoming less relevant. At this point, Linux laptop sellers like System76 and Purism are the biggest promoters of desktop Linux, and they don’t have the resources of IBM/Red Hat, SUSE and Canonical to pay for development.

I think that Canonical had the right idea with mobile Linux, but the essential problem was that it gave up on producing its own hardware because it only raised $12 million in crowdfunding for its Edge, and it thought that $32 million was necessary to produce a Linux phone. Canonical’s hardware partners (BQ and Meizu) never properly marketed Ubuntu Touch phones. To make mobile Linux work, you have to have a hardware company that markets it to the global tech enthusiast community, as PINE64 and Purism are now doing, and focuses on the things that Android and iOS can’t provide (software freedom, user rights, ability to tinker and open hardware, privacy and good convergence), so users are willing to suffer through the privations of being early adopters.

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44

i believe we already have a thread opened here on the Purism forum about systemd so no need to expand about that in this thread …

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… and let’s not forget that Raspbian is also in the Debian family, and there are a lot of Raspberry Pi computers in the world.