I seem to recall a long time ago that a promise was made (now under threat of being broken) that there would never be differently-priced versions of Ubuntu Desktop: a free one, and a premium, paid-for one (like Redhat does it, with Fedora and Redhat Enterprise). The “Ubuntu Pro” account is free for now for 3 machines, but how long will that last?
It might be possible to “opt out” at this time (once 22.04 is released), but is this the “thin end of a wedge” that will just get more and more annoying over time? And what is the punishment exactly for an opt-out?
My sense is just not to upgrade from 20.04 to 22.04. Hopefully that will avoid being nagged.
I am not sure exactly what this is suggesting, maybe its a subscription service of some kind instead of a premium edition. They haven’t offered a lot of info on this as far as I am aware.
Though real quick, RHEL is free to everyone now. all you got to do is sign up for a Red Hat account and then you get up 16 separate simultaneous instances of RHEL if you want. They made this change about a year ago during the CentOS Saga.
I’ve currently been enjoying LFS Pro. For the past seven months I’ve been assembling a telephone, cables, and call center to be able to take advantage of support.
Seriously, though, it did remind me of a RedHat/Suse kind of program, and it could be that Support is where the money is at in Open Source. (Which makes sense to me.)
Currently, I’m not in a position to need the professional grade of support as I’m sure larger businesses might require. But I’m glad its there, and if they offer it once in every install, it might not be a bad way to drum up some business.
(I’ll take a nag-notice over auto-opt-in any day! )
I have actually considered giving RedHat a go, as they use it professionally at work, but I don’t know if I’m up to the learning curve.
Same here, if there’s money to be made in professional support, and you have companies that are willing to subscribe to these services, why not?
I’m ok with a professional grade for companies (because they have other needs) and the regular grade for the “every day” user. (couldn’t come up with a better term).
If the nagging consists of a one time message which you can discard, then i’m ok with that.
Honestly…if I could tolerate using Ubuntu, I would consider it. OpenSource is great, but we talk pretty regularly about how there’s not a lot of incentives for companies to focus on Desktop stuff. If we could change the way we think about stuff to Free as in Freedom, not so much Free as in Beer, we’d definitely see an improvement in the quality of stuff we use.
I am in no way suggesting that what we have no isn’t “Good”, but there’s always room for improvement, and proving that there’s money in developing for linux, or on the linux desktops means more dev cycles.
It remains to be seen just how many “Dark Patterns” are entailed by this Ubuntu Pro offering.
To what extent will Canonical have to create/enforce a sort of “anti-cheat” technology, to prevent people from somehow getting the benefits with no subscription? And will there be downstream problems for Linux Mint?
I’ve been thinking about this. If Canonical want to make this they should be able to, and if we don’t want to buy it then we don’t have to. Everyone’s a winner.
Also if they go back to their karmic koala colour scheme I may consider it.
all you got to do is sign up for a Red Hat account and then you get up 16 separate simultaneous instances of RHEL if you want. They made this change about a year ago during the CentOS Saga.
