Ubuntu Advantage is being wired deeper into the distro • The Register

Ubuntu and its varied remixes stay free distros, but it surely’s getting tougher to take away the messages concerning the paid Ubuntu Professional providing… which is by design, and it isn’t going away.

Final yr, we wrote about promotional messages in the output of Ubuntu’s apt command and the way some customers had been aggrieved by what they noticed as promoting – though Canonical made Ubunto Pro free of charge for particular person customers, on as much as 5 machines, in October.

Within the pursuits of equity, we do observe that Canonical responded to the primary of these tales, and that it has added a strategy to flip the messages off. In a shell session, simply kind:

sudo professional config set apt_news=false

However these messages aren’t the one ones that seem within the output in case you replace your machine from a terminal immediate. As an example, doing a full improve on the present 22.04 launch on this vulture’s personal laptop computer, the next additional textual content seems:

Get extra safety updates via Ubuntu Professional with 'esm-apps' enabled:  
python2.7-minimal imagemagick libjs-jquery-ui libopenexr25 libmagickcore-6.q16-6-extra libmagickwand-6.q16-6 libpython2.7 imagemagick-6.q16 libmagickcore-6.q16-6 imagemagick-6-common python2.7 libpython2.7-minimal libpython2.7-stdlib

These “esm-apps” are packages eligible for canopy underneath Canonical’s Expanded Safety Upkeep program. After all, you may do away with the discover by getting a free Ubuntu Professional account, attaching your laptop to it, and enabling ESM Apps updates within the Software program & Updates program, or alternatively, using the terminal:

sudo professional allow esm-apps

This new professional command is included in a package deal known as ubuntu-advantage-tools. You may assume that one strategy to completely stop these messages could be to take away the package deal that gives the Ubuntu Benefit integration – however you may’t. As Ubuntu bug #1950692 describes, the Benefit Instruments package deal is now a requirement of the core ubuntu-minimal metapackage, so in case you take away it, it should take away a number of different core packages. Ubuntu and Debian developer Steve Langasek defended the choice to make the package deal a dependency on the ubuntu-devel mailing listing.

This isn’t the one bug report referring to the difficulty: bug #1992026 is concerning the extra output, and in a comment there, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth defends the transfer.

For Linux customers looking for to maneuver away from telemetry-riddled proprietary OSes, these strikes will not win Canonical any associates, and we suspect that eradicating this performance represents a possibility for the numerous distros on the market derived from Ubuntu. As with every monetization effort, Canonical has to weigh up the trade-offs: getting some extra income, versus alienating customers and driving them to maneuver to different distros. One might need thought that Canonical would have labored this out after the first such revolt, a decade ago.

Additionally, after all, an alternative choice is to trace the short-term releases of Ubuntu. Solely LTS variations are eligible for Ubuntu Professional cowl, so in case you do not run LTS variations, you then’ll solely get messages about it for ¾ of every two-year launch cycle.

We really feel it additionally bears repeating that solely the official GNOME taste of Ubuntu will get the total 5 years of help, plus 5 additional years by way of Ubuntu Professional. Should you run one of many remixes, it is best to improve your machines each time a brand new LTS model is launched. As an example, within the release notes for Kubuntu 22.04, the oldest remix of all of them, it clearly says:

Help lifespan Kubuntu 22.04 will likely be supported for 3 years.

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Bootnote

Our thanks for reader “brb.repo” for pointing this out to us.