Post-Fedora life with Ubuntu 12.04 has been good. I haven’t upgraded to 12.10 (I’m going to stick with a long-term-support release for now), but I’ve heard from people that refuse to upgrade due to the new advertising that shows up in search results. Apparently, Canonical 1) is trying to find ways of generating revenue, 2) made it very easy to disable the advertising. LWN.net explains what’s going on, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains how to disable the advertising.
http://lwn.net/Articles/528781/
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/10/privacy-ubuntu-1210-amazon-ads-and-data-leaks
The simple command to disable the advertising is:
sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping
If one is concerned about this, it seems to me that one ought to also be concerned about online advertisers and about gmail sorting through one’s email.