I wouldn't call it crap-ware. Sure, it's turned on by default but there is an option to turn them off.

The question I have is why it's turned in by default -- and why it's there in the first place? If it's there for revenue, then Ubuntu really isn't free.. You're paying by essentially leasing your computer to this revenue generating 'stuff'. Your 'payment' isn't monetary, but it's still a payment. Why can't we just buy stuff with actual money instead of going through the illusion that it's 'free?'

I honestly don't have much experience with Ubuntu or this sort of thing, so I really don't understand it.

A bit of everything. The dash' online component will search amazon etc for products while you type, but it will also search Wikipedia and seemingly every online resource under the sun. If I want to search Wikipedia I go there, so for me it's just annoying, but I can see it being useful to some.

I'm not judging the Ubuntu stuff, I .. don't use that.

But your comment could be equally applied to the crapware installers? Most stuff could be opted-out of - if you're actually careful and ignoring the UX dark patterns (like small print, grey skip buttons etc).

On Windows there's usually a option to remove the crapware, too. On both OS, this function is well-hidden.

fixubuntu.com ?

...Piping wget into bash? Really?

NO.

(I mean, at least it's HTTPS, but still.)

Funny how people complain about piping wget into bash, but will happily install and run random node/ruby/whatever packages downloaded from a random github repository.[1]

The truth is that program isolation sucks terribly on all operating systems that one might reasonably use for a development machine. Fixing that would be so great, but a lot of work.

[1] Perhaps you're the lone wolfling who doesn't do that, but I have seen this kind of behaviour from people on the don't-pipe-wget-into-shell bandwagon.

Certificate pinning helps with Github, but doesn't help with <random website that I've never visited before>.

(Still doesn't help if the software package itself - that is the canonical copy - is malicious - but prevents MITMing from anyone that doesn't have that particular certificate, at least.)

That being said, you have a (very) valid point. Modern OSes are... not exactly secure.

That's the #1 reason ALL the computers in my house aren't Ubuntu but Debian.

Yeah, I still prefer any Ubuntu LTS release and 10 minutes of post-install tweaking to Debian. Plus I like Unity. And lubuntu is very well suited for the rest of the ex-windows users. It has been 4 years. Nobody complained, apart from a couple of guys on HN. Certainly not the users, and they are who matter the most.

I think you mean Unity. And that's what I use on my computer, but the rest of them are running lubuntu.