There are a lot of reasons that I really like Ubuntu. Foremost among them is the availability of help: there are a wealth of posts on Ask Ubuntu and elsewhere that are often super useful when trying to solve almost any Ubuntu problem. It’s great. It’s especially good for someone new to Linux.

But I am not on board with Ubuntu’s new plan to have everyone sign up to Ubuntu Pro in order to receive updates. This rankles me for reasons I can’t quite articulate. Ubuntu Pro is free for personal use (under 5 machines), and then there is an enterprise tier above that. I assume that the reason for insisting that everyone register is so that they can monetize all those organizations with more than five installs.

But to me this goes against the spirit of free software. Refusing to update non-registered users is just licensing by other means. So I’m probably going to move on to another distro. I’ve posted before about how I have been enjoying running Debian on my Chromebook. I like it for different reasons than Ubuntu. My (possibly incorrect) initial impressions are that Debian is more stable and more command line-focused than Ubuntu. Which is fine; perhaps even preferable.

I have some new (to me) hardware that I’m going to install Debian on this weekend. We’ll see how it goes.

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