torn and kinda disgruntled

I have Ubuntu 12.04 (and Kubuntu 12.04) installed here; I'm thinking that I might put off installing the next LTS release, 14.04, until the first point release comes out, but I've said that before and then I didn't wait.

12.04 didn't have the online search stuff. Take a look here at what folks are saying about turning all that stuff off:

Go to Settings, security and privacy, and then turn that stuff off. You should turn off “include online seach results” and you may want to turn off the thingie that shows your recently open documents. All this clutters up the dashboard, but if you want this information there, by all means leave it.

Get rid of the shopping suggestions with this code at the console:

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’]”

Disable online searches from dash with
wget -q -O – https://fixubuntu.com/fixubuntu.sh | bash

Looks easy enough to do, and it would be probably take only a few minutes, but seeing all that kinda irritates me. If I was new to Linux, those things would not be easy to do. I have to admit, it does make me have second thoughts about continuing to run Ubuntu...

I could just stay with 12.04; support for that doesn't end 2017. I could go with Kubuntu 14.04 or Ubuntu GNOME 14.04 or another derivative and avoid all the Unity search stuff. I could just say, "Oh, well," turn the stuff off as noted above, and be done with it (that's probably what I'll end up doing). Or, I could just forget the whole thing and dump Ubuntu for good.

I haven't decided.

One other thing that's bugging me is that some people have reported not being able to log into their GNOME Shell sessions when after they've added GNOME Shell to Ubuntu 14.04 (http://ubuntuforums....d.php?t=2219373). I have GNOME Shell added to Ubuntu 12.04; I figure that there'll eventually be a fix for this.

Well, I have had a nice run with the Ubuntu LTS releases, going back to 6.06 from several years ago. But... drat, why couldn't they have made this Unity online search an opt-in thing? I'm definitely feeling torn...