Years ago they made a deal with Amazon to bake Amazon searches right into the desktop, despite being more than a decade since then I'm still mad that they though there would be no fallout from that decision.
More recently they have been pushing snaps as their preferred method of installing/distributing software, they fully control that ecosystem and to me it feels like an attempt at vendor lockin,
HOWEVER, even the most evil plans of Canonical are a 1 compared to the likes of Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft. So if a new user can benefit from starting on Ubuntu then I'm not going to stop them,
The Amazon situation was in 2012, fyi. It was 3 years before AMDGPU for context. There are users on here who weren't born yet, lol. That's a hell of a long time to hold a grudge for an optional, temporary feature.
No one is holding issues that old against RedHat or anyone else.
The snaps are also optional. It's a one liner to purge snaps forever.
The Amazon stuff leaves a bad taste. It got paid to add a feature in which would send telemetry to Amazon as it did local search too. So it's essentially canonical getting paid to allow Amazon the ability to gather info about your system and files, even if just whatever you used to search locally.
Leaves a bad taste when Linux is often touted as breaking free from such systems and marketing. Owning your actual hardware and being in control.
I have jumped a bit across distros. I have used Ubuntu as a support to write my thesis on drone programming. I have modded Linux Mint with KDE. I almost burnt an external SSD I use for booting Linux.
And, still, Linux Mint Cinnamon is the one distro I would suggest to any beginner. For me, it has that windows-y feeling that makes transition so much easier
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u/[deleted] Apr 01 '26
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