shopping crap

As I've mentioned before, I'm still running Ubuntu 12.04, so I haven't yet had to deal with the Unity shopping lens issue.

To remove it in 12.10 and 13.04, it was this simple command:

$ sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping

There's no "shopping lens" to remove in Ubuntu 13.10 because the whole thing is part of the Unity Smart Scopes project. Individual "scopes" plugins can be disabled. And to disable all shopping results:

$ gsettings set com.canonical.Unity.Lenses disabled-scopes "['more_suggestions-amazon.scope', 'more_suggestions-u1ms.scope', 'more_suggestions-populartracks.scope', 'music-musicstore.scope', 'more_suggestions-ebay.scope', 'more_suggestions-ubuntushop.scope', 'more_suggestions-skimlinks.scope']"

A few relevant links:

http://www.mybookmarks.ro/desktop-ubuntu/how-to-disable-amazon-shopping-suggestions-and-other-unity-scopes-in-ubuntu-13-10/

http://linuxg.net/how-to-deactivate-the-shopping-lense-on-ubuntu-13-10-saucy-salamander/

http://askubuntu.com/questions/366238/how-do-i-remove-only-shopping-searches

So, even though it still amounts to a simple copy-and-paste procedure, they made it more difficult, and now I'm ticked off.

I'll wait and see what happens with 14.04. There's a lot I like about Ubuntu, and I have a lot of options available that would allow me to continue enjoying the things about it that I like.

I could run the above command to disable the shopping results. I could add GNOME Shell or something else and use that instead of Unity. I could go with Kubuntu or Xubuntu or Linux Mint or Ubuntu GNOME to avoid the whole issue. I could just keep running 12.04.

Or I could just get away from anything related to Canonical. I've made sure not to let myself get too tied down to any one distro (besides Debian, I guess). I can take it or leave it.

I'll see how I feel next year, I guess. But I'm not so sure anymore that I'll be continuing on with Ubuntu.