Huh, I was using Ubuntu as my daily driver circa 2014 and I don’t remember this at all… maybe I stopped just prior to them implementing it… or maybe it just didn’t make enough of an impression for me to notice.
It could have been earlier? i tried Ubuntu around 2012. I didn’t know how to get rid of the Amazon stuff, and it turned me off Linux…thinking why use this OS that is ad based…wasn’t till 2017 when W10 made our computers slow that I tried linux again.
I was digging LMDE until my 8GB of ram simply couldn’t handle the load and I’m in AntiX now. Honestly, I’ve watched Mint go from being immature and insecure to security leaders without losing their accessibility. Solid and incredibly important distro if you ask me
I quit, told him to go fuck himself, that we see who he really is and to delete my account after he started banning journalists who dared to criticize the “free speech absolutionist” dickhead.
(that is an actual quote from the sentence immediately following “We’re not putting ads in Ubuntu” in Mark Shuttleworth’s blog post responding to the entirely predictable backlash after they did this, twelve years ago…)
Mark Richard Shuttleworth (born 18 September 1973) is a South African and British entrepreneur who is the founder and CEO of Canonical, the company behind the development of the Linux-based Ubuntu operating system.[1] In 2002, Shuttleworth became the first South African to travel to space, doing so as a space tourist.[2][3][4] He lives on the Isle of Man and holds dual citizenship from South Africa and the United Kingdom.[5][6] According to the Sunday Times Rich List in 2020, Shuttleworth is worth an estimated £500 million. –Wikipedia
They were heavily panned for that back then. My image of Ubuntu of that time is heavily associated with their Unity desktop which they latter dropped(only for it to spring up again).