https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2026/04/ubuntu-ai-features https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-AI-Features-2026 Somebody called it ubi-slop! If it can't be easily stripped out i can see a lot of people ditching Ubuntu, myself included.
Looks like the AI bits will all be packaged as downloadable snaps due to size, so just as easy to not download:- https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-AI-Kill-Switch-Opt-In (But they are adding vibe-coded halibut carp too! )
The whole reason Canonical's doing it at all is 'cos Shuttleworth thinks he's finally found something for which people will want to use snaps. Me? When my current LTS goes EOL, I guess I'm moving. Debian, probably. Maybe Arch, btw. Hell, Haiku? Ooh, 9front? Could I actually do a day's work in 9front?
Would be nice if all but the essential components of Windows, were optional downloads you can just ignore if you don't want them, perhaps with an optional version loaded with the popular extras included, for those that don't just an easy, ready go to version. Not going happen though. Really must get on with learning my way around Linux...
These were my two competitors tbh. I wanted to stick with Ubuntu just because I wasn’t sure if I wanted the overhead of a rolling release. I also wanted to use Waydroid and it didn’t have automatic pastry networking in Arch or didn’t when I was testing anyway, and although I now can’t remember details, it was some kind of a pain to fix or something.
if I refused to use anything that did/enabled shady **** in the us military I would probably have to eschew all technology and live in a cave. nivdia are facilitating the panopticon for palantir amd are too busy gargling trump's balls and chasing nvidia to give a **** about what we think about them microsoft... well how long have you got... plus even if i was to switch rocky linux for something else I'd still be subject to redhat's input and influence [GNOME, systemd, their contributions to the kernel, etc] ultimately rocky does the job I need it to and that's all I really care about. otherwise... the list of things I have the mental bandwidth to give a **** about is limited and red hat's cuntery is not on it....
Yeah ethical consumption is hard as **** under open source. Attributions typically go under individual employees on source repositories, and of course people and companies change priorities and contribute code here and there and then move on. We might be using code from the worst person but it works and no-one can replace it with it anything better, so they don’t bother.
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2026/05/ubuntu-websites-ddos-attack Probably didn't like the AI announcement.
https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/05/ubuntu-infrastructure-has-been-down-for-more-than-a-day/ More info on Ubuntu being down, seems to be political.
