While installing the essentials and all, my eyes fell on the gnome bar which looked bare, without the UbuntuONE icon, and that’s what reminded me of the cloud. I pressed the super key and typed the name in the dash, intending to configure it, but surprisingly, it didnt return any such App. I therefore, blaming myself for not upgrading properly, decided to install it manually when a thought hit me. That’s when I checked the Ubuntu One twitter account and there it was, in one of the most recent posts, my unasked question answered.

Turns out, that it had been announced sometime around the start of April that by June the services would be shutdown, and the client app would not be included in the upcoming release by default. Reason, there isnt one. All it says on the blog is that their aim for Ubuntu is to provide the world with a bla-bla-bla OS, and that they should be focussing more on that, while the free-storage field is not for them to step in.  It was also mentioned that there are services that now provide upto 25GB of free storage, and UbuntuOne would require a bit more investment if it has to compete with such services. Users have until 31 July 31 to backup there data after which it would be permanently shut down.

If you ask me, the cloud was one of the reasons why I preferred Ubuntu. I tried a number of cloud services, no really, quite a number, and I always wanted one that would like always be backing my data up, smoothly, without being much of a bother. U1, though has a crappy web UI is the only one I got comfortable with. SkyDrive, quite frankly sucked back then (though there have been improvements following the release of Windows 8.1 that set it at par with U1), and there’s this peculiar problem with Google’s installers that prevented me from trying the best of Drive. Thus U1, I preferred over all, though it didnt offer the best web-based UI, or a huge amount of storage, or an online office suite, but in what it did offer and what it was supposed to be, it was flawless.. like a charm it worked for me. No, it’s not always the storage amounts that attract consumers, no, it’s user-friendliness that matters more.

I’d rather they don’t shut the service down. It’s one of the things that together with Ubuntu make a great combination.