Canonical gets a lot of rants nowadays (some with good reason, e.g. snap), but there’s an upside to the product as well: it’s managed as a desktop distro product from a user’s perspective.
I’ve been running a couple of Fedora versions as desktops on fully supported hardware and, oh my, they were quite bad in terms of stability (bluetooth not working, video calls breaking), speed, and general UX when compared with Ubuntu.
Sure, distro X, _when properly tuned_, will be better than Ubuntu. But a lot of users, even power users, are in Linux to do their job, which is NOT tuning linux distros.
Ubuntu OOB experience right now is still the best for a Linux imho (pop os actually, but it’s an ubuntu spinoff).
I tried Debian about 1y ago and its desktop defaults were very cheap, requiring a lot of work as a user.
Open to changing my mind. But please, let’a discuss a default experience, not a ton-of-tuning-patches-installs experience .
Exactly this, I had the same experience. Outside of the embedded boxes with predefined distro, I usually use some Virtualbox VM on my PC. And in practice only Ubuntu (I'm running Xubunty variation) is mostly stable, non-glitchy, predictable, and no issues or weird settings with package manager (and snap also works fine). Debian Stable, Fedora, Manjaro all had a lot of different and highly annoying to breaking issues in my environment. And I'm not a Linux admin, my Linux knowledge about debugging drivers, package managers, 2D and 3D acceleration, release upgrades etc. is about zero, despite working daily on Linux boxes. That's my failing, sure, but I do want some distro which I can use right now, and that's often Ubuntu family.
I hear this often, but it confuses me, reasons listed below:
> Fedora versions as desktops on fully supported hardware
Is there a list somewhere, as I have not seen this. (Seriously).
> oh my, they were quite bad in terms of stability (bluetooth not working,
Fedora has a practiced behavior of fixes getting upstream first before shipping, (rising tide lifts all boats). If bluetooth was broken for fedora, it likely would be broken across multiple distribution, and the ubuntus would have had to do something that wasn't upstream.
If ubuntu ship patches different than upstream, then it just come down to a timing issue of when your specific hardware has been fixed.
I can talk more about the other points you mentioned, They seem more anecdotal than provable (Which is fine, perception is 9/10ths of the law).
>I’ve been running a couple of Fedora versions as desktops on fully supported hardware and, oh my, they were quite bad in terms of stability (bluetooth not working, video calls breaking), speed, and general UX when compared with Ubuntu.
These things have little to do with the distro. They should be identical, barring version differences. Maybe you had breakage with Fedora because of bleeding edge stuff, but the other way round is equally likely, where Ubuntu LTS will be too old for new hardware. Once your hardware is 1-2 years old, all distros become largely identical. And if your hardware is already old, RHEL/Rocky/Alma will work too.
> Sure, distro X, _when properly tuned_, will be better than Ubuntu. But a lot of users, even power users, are in Linux to do their job, which is NOT tuning linux distros.
So let people whose job does include 'tuning' operating systems handle that. Does your company not have an IT department or something?
> Open to changing my mind. But please, let’a discuss a default experience, not a ton-of-tuning-patches-installs experience.
Again, where is this double-standard coming from? Since when do fleets of Windows laptops run without any 'tuning'? The work it takes to get a decent UX on Linux given known hardware, selected for the purpose, is extremely trivial for anyone who knows Linux at all.
It's not hard to master your own install media for most distros either. Buy your shit from a decent Linux hardware vendor and they'll even install whatever custom OS you want before they send you the machines.
This idea that a whole-ass company should be somehow helplessly captive to distro defaults is pitiful. Hire someone with decent Linux competency and prepare a suitable OS image! It's what you should be doing regardless of the Ubuntu question.
> Ubuntu OOB experience right now is still the best for a Linux
Strongly disagree. Installing Ubuntu is still a bewildering process for non-Linux-experts. It actually seems to have gone downhill in the last 10 years. Mint is quite a bit more understandable.
I like some of how Ubuntu is polished on the desktop, but I ended up moving 2 startups from Ubuntu to Debian Stable.
Debian Stable had fewer regressions in security updates, Ubuntu really dropped the ball on one regression that would make some devices unbootable (Ubuntu strangely silent on the bricking, and I had to confirm it with a contact at another distro company), getting rid of Ubuntu's Snap changing things outside of APT control was a huge relief, and we don't have to worry as much about privacy&security problems of Debian phoning-home.
The biggest headache with Debian was installing laptop workstations, due to WiFi usually needing firmware blobs. It required complicated instructions and contortions that made it a million times harder. But that's now solved: https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-in...
Also, especially for startups, there are often efficiencies to using Debian Stable for everything for which it can be used. For example, it's not the smallest base of a bespoke Docker container, but there are development and operations (personnel) efficiencies when containers, host servers, and workstations are all running the same thing. Fewer surprises in production, less time and complexity trying to support multiple environments, and you can rapidly debug some things more easily on bare metal on workstation when necessary.
> The biggest headache with Debian was installing laptop workstations was that WiFi needing firmware blobs required complicated instructions and contortions that made it a million times harder. But that's now solved: https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-in...
And the official installer is going to provide the non-free firmware now (and non-free firmware will also be in a separate non-free-firmware section of the repositories so you won't need to enable the whole non-free section anymore)
> Debian Stable had fewer regressions in security updates, Ubuntu really dropped the ball on one regression that would make some devices unbootable (Ubuntu strangely silent on the bricking, and I had to confirm it with a contact at another distro company), getting rid of Ubuntu's Snap changing things outside of APT control was a huge relief, and we don't have to worry as much about privacy&security problems of Debian phoning-home.
That said, both Debian and Ubuntu have been passable in my experience, both on the desktop and for servers, basically the whole DEB group of distros including something like Linux Mint and others on the desktop as a daily driver.
I might be an outlier, but they've generally let me get things done more quickly and easily when compared to something like CentOS, RHEL, Oracle Linux and so on (though Fedora on the desktop was generally pretty good). On RPM distros things tended to go wrong, everything from using Docker instead of Podman for Docker Swarm in some smaller projects not being entirely supported (even when Podman didn't have feature parity), some oddness when setting up K3s clusters because I didn't have resources for OpenShift or whatever, regular Docker networking failing and needing to add masquerading to firewall configuration, issues with SELinux not playing nicely with some software, kswapd utterly killing the CPU when the system is running low on swap and others.
> Also, especially for startups, there are often efficiencies to using Debian Stable for everything for which it can be used. For example, it's not the smallest base of a bespoke Docker container, but there are development and operations (personnel) efficiencies when containers, host servers, and workstations are all running the same thing. Fewer surprises in production, less time and complexity trying to support multiple environments, and you can rapidly debug some things more easily on bare metal on workstation when necessary.
I actually moved over my container images to Ubuntu as well, so that I can setup dev environments on the desktop directly the same way I would for a container (sometimes debugging inside of containers is a pain): https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/using-ubuntu-as-the-base-fo...
So now I'm basically running the setup you're describing (the same OS locally, on servers and also in containers) even if I've settled on Ubuntu LTS instead because of the longer EOL and it's been a great experience so far! That said, the whole snaps/Flatpak/AppImage situation could be a bit better.
"Canonical is unlikely to be that interested in the views of people who have little or no chance of giving them money, people like us."
A university in one of the richest countries in the world, the academics employed by it, and the students who attend have little or no chance of giving them money? Of course you do. You just don't want to.
It is not that any employee can just purchase things in academia (at least in 3 different countries I worked at). Most money and purchasing power, approvals go to official-administrators (even if Professors take efforts to apply and receive grants). Spending is highly regulated. There were times I was denied buying RHEL telling me to use a 'free linux'. There is a wide belief (among official-administrators) Linux is free so paying for it is the employee wasting money. To even encourage Dell's linux server offerings I once purchased a few preinstalled RHEL devices but was later asked why not use free ones (or the windows dell offerings as they were strangely cheaper - thanks to bloatware).
At the same if you say you need to buy a windows server or zoom license this will be approved as these people know that it is not free. Their society is conditioned in this way.
In the rare case if this was approved, usually there are external auditors that analyse spent money and come back at you for not using free linux.
Ideally Canonical and RedHat (via IBM) goes to these administrators (or meetings in Ministry of Education) and advise them that making software is $$.
Unless the job involves making specialized computing infrastructure, like supercomputing applications etc., the sundry IT ops of university get a rather tiny part of budget. Majority of a typical CS department's amortized spending can be ranked into - staff salary, library subscriptions, graduate student payroll, facility overhead, IT & other services - in that order usually.
I wonder how much of Mark Shuttleworth's personal funding is still at play in keeping Canonical alive.
A quick web search returns articles claiming the company has been profitable since 2018 and that an IPO may be in the works. I can understand how something like Red Hat has managed to survive over the past twenty years, given the name it has built for itself in the "enterprise" Linux world (for better or worse), but Canonical continuing to operate off the back of Ubuntu has always baffled me.
Ubuntu has been the most popular Linux distribution for nearly 20 years. Are you surprised that translates in support contracts in the enterprise world?
It isn’t to me. People keep using what they are familiar with on their servers. Plus it’s one of the default option at most hosting provider.
I love Ubuntu., It installs in minutes and then stays out of my way for years and years. I want them to make money so Ubuntu keeps existing. I think it's just impossible to run a company on full RMS mode. But let's hope they stay decent, perhaps cut down a bit on the snap pushing, whenever I think "wtf is wrong with Docker", someone installed the snap version.
One thing I would like: Ubuntu Declarative Donkey, come on, get some inspiration from NixOS, make it simpler, it's time.
Ubuntu has immense goodwill and will have a warm place in everyone's hearts for a long time. I hope they don't squander it away with snaps or other stuff. It's a hard business though. Not sure how they keep it afloat forever.
I get why its so, but Ubuntu being the "default" linux distro is annoying when you aren't running Ubuntu. I run into little things like hardcoded Ubuntu paths in apps, or running into some unfixable bug in a cloud instance because the Ubuntu packages are so old.
This is like the “IE is the default browser”, or “I have tested it in Chrome which is what majority uses anyway” arguments that have proven to falter over time anyway. Linux is better off avoiding such “default” choices. It’s not like it is cohesively built like MacOS anyway. We might as well enjoy the fragmentation.
>I run into little things like hardcoded Ubuntu paths in apps
what are you referring to? do you mean packages shipped on your distro are broken because the maintainers didn't change the paths or do you mean that pre-compiled binaries don't work?
because, I mean, the whole point of open source is that you can personally get your hands dirty and change the stuff. if you use binaries instead of compiling then that's what you get unfortunately
I'd love to pay for Ubuntu, but they don't make it easy.
If I start an AWS windows, rhel or suse EC2 I pay far more than with ubuntu. I'm not sure if the Ubuntu AMI has any "software" charge, but RHEL on a t3.large is 14.32c/hour in US-East-2, Ubuntu is 8.32c/hour.
About 15 years ago I moved from Ubuntu to Debian testing and it was probably one of the best feelings I ever had in my professional career. Bumps have happened buy I never looked back and probably never will. Kudos to them, but the bloat is too much for me.
I suggest to use Debian "unstable". I think the name "unstable" made a lot of disservice to it.
The thing with testing is that security wise it's the worst of both unstable and stable. It does not get timely security fixes from upstream, nor from security backports to stable.
I would be glad to wire Canonical some money, iff Canonical would offer a subscription that would relief me from some of the remaining pain of running Ubuntu.
Most importantly that would be running a VM for MS Office, Adobe and Autodesk without all the friction of having a complete desktop inside another window, managing shared folders etc etc. I'm already paying VMWare $80/yr for a shitty experience and would be glad to switch.
Alternativley, just charge for premium support for individuals that actually helps out.
I'm not a financial advisor, but is running ads and bothering people with all this snap BS really the best strategy they can came up with?
I'm under the impression that many people genuinely believe or have believed that Ubuntu is a community project to the same degree as other corporation-adjacent Linux distros like Fedora or openSUSE. And it kinda was 15 years ago! But it is not, today.
I work for Canonical (but I'm speaking for myself; I'm not authorised to speak for Canonical anyway).
I've been around in Free Software since the nineties. At that time, it seemed very much a hobbyist effort and entirely outside the commercial world. I liked the idea of empowering users, but as much as I wanted the model to be successful, it was unclear if it was sustainable. There were plenty of naysayers.
Back then there were a bunch of new companies trying to find a business model around Free Software. Many folded. Canonical is one of the few still standing.
There's a huge bunch of work that's needed to maintain a distribution that people tend not to volunteer for, but that still needs doing. Having a functional business model allows this work to get done.
So yes, of course Ubuntu is a commercial product. The commercial side is needed to fund the free side. How this is done is a delicate balance, but how Canonical has negotiated this seems to be OK because it's one of the few still left standing. Better that than nothing at all.
Debian is a bit of an exception, but it doesn't properly work as a counterexample because a number of Debian Developers are employed by Canonical whose work also goes into Debian, and the non-DDs at Canonical working on Ubuntu also send a firehose of patches to Debian. I wouldn't claim that Debian couldn't stand on its without this contribution, but equally one can't really discount it either.
Speculation that Ubuntu will move what it has provided for free to a paywall or a subscription wall seems unhelpful to me, given that this has never actually happened in its history. The speculation seems to arise, and Canonical/Ubuntu is getting this current flak, for having dared to provide more.
Look, I am sympathetic to Canonical, and a lot of those on the other side of the debate do feel a but scummy. They do strike a certain impression of people who just want something for free, like a cartoonish stereotype of a freeloader. That said, I do feel like a lot of the pushback that Canonical got would have been avoided if they just didn't try to advertise in terminal output, as benign as it was in my opinion.
I don't know what the right answer is. Clearly some sort of balance has worked for both Red Hat (although that is shifting) and Canonical, it's just a question of whether pulling too hard into things people feel is scummy will stand the test of time.
CentOS Linux vs. CentOS Stream was not about RHEL not making enough money to Red Hat. Red Hats knew perfectly well that something like Alma or Rocky would pop up and is doing nothing (quite the opposite in fact) to stop them.
It was indirectly about money in that CentOS was negative money. RH got nothing back for the time/money it was investing in CentOS. Of course, why they acquired CentOS in the first place is equally puzzling as this outcome was predictable even back then.
And I love Ubuntu for that. Everything just works and I never have problems with it. No one wants to struggle when using an OS, and OSes always have some type of glitch.
Ubuntu stopped focusing on being the premiere desktop experience when the dropped Unity for Gnome 3. Linux Mint has surpassed Ubuntu and become a better desktop Linux.
[+] [-] alanfranz|3 years ago|reply
I’ve been running a couple of Fedora versions as desktops on fully supported hardware and, oh my, they were quite bad in terms of stability (bluetooth not working, video calls breaking), speed, and general UX when compared with Ubuntu.
Sure, distro X, _when properly tuned_, will be better than Ubuntu. But a lot of users, even power users, are in Linux to do their job, which is NOT tuning linux distros.
Ubuntu OOB experience right now is still the best for a Linux imho (pop os actually, but it’s an ubuntu spinoff). I tried Debian about 1y ago and its desktop defaults were very cheap, requiring a lot of work as a user.
Open to changing my mind. But please, let’a discuss a default experience, not a ton-of-tuning-patches-installs experience .
[+] [-] Yizahi|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ungamedplayer|3 years ago|reply
> Fedora versions as desktops on fully supported hardware
Is there a list somewhere, as I have not seen this. (Seriously).
> oh my, they were quite bad in terms of stability (bluetooth not working,
Fedora has a practiced behavior of fixes getting upstream first before shipping, (rising tide lifts all boats). If bluetooth was broken for fedora, it likely would be broken across multiple distribution, and the ubuntus would have had to do something that wasn't upstream.
If ubuntu ship patches different than upstream, then it just come down to a timing issue of when your specific hardware has been fixed.
I can talk more about the other points you mentioned, They seem more anecdotal than provable (Which is fine, perception is 9/10ths of the law).
[+] [-] bubblethink|3 years ago|reply
These things have little to do with the distro. They should be identical, barring version differences. Maybe you had breakage with Fedora because of bleeding edge stuff, but the other way round is equally likely, where Ubuntu LTS will be too old for new hardware. Once your hardware is 1-2 years old, all distros become largely identical. And if your hardware is already old, RHEL/Rocky/Alma will work too.
[+] [-] pxc|3 years ago|reply
So let people whose job does include 'tuning' operating systems handle that. Does your company not have an IT department or something?
> Open to changing my mind. But please, let’a discuss a default experience, not a ton-of-tuning-patches-installs experience.
Again, where is this double-standard coming from? Since when do fleets of Windows laptops run without any 'tuning'? The work it takes to get a decent UX on Linux given known hardware, selected for the purpose, is extremely trivial for anyone who knows Linux at all.
It's not hard to master your own install media for most distros either. Buy your shit from a decent Linux hardware vendor and they'll even install whatever custom OS you want before they send you the machines.
This idea that a whole-ass company should be somehow helplessly captive to distro defaults is pitiful. Hire someone with decent Linux competency and prepare a suitable OS image! It's what you should be doing regardless of the Ubuntu question.
[+] [-] phendrenad2|3 years ago|reply
Strongly disagree. Installing Ubuntu is still a bewildering process for non-Linux-experts. It actually seems to have gone downhill in the last 10 years. Mint is quite a bit more understandable.
[+] [-] neilv|3 years ago|reply
Debian Stable had fewer regressions in security updates, Ubuntu really dropped the ball on one regression that would make some devices unbootable (Ubuntu strangely silent on the bricking, and I had to confirm it with a contact at another distro company), getting rid of Ubuntu's Snap changing things outside of APT control was a huge relief, and we don't have to worry as much about privacy&security problems of Debian phoning-home.
The biggest headache with Debian was installing laptop workstations, due to WiFi usually needing firmware blobs. It required complicated instructions and contortions that made it a million times harder. But that's now solved: https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-in...
Also, especially for startups, there are often efficiencies to using Debian Stable for everything for which it can be used. For example, it's not the smallest base of a bespoke Docker container, but there are development and operations (personnel) efficiencies when containers, host servers, and workstations are all running the same thing. Fewer surprises in production, less time and complexity trying to support multiple environments, and you can rapidly debug some things more easily on bare metal on workstation when necessary.
[+] [-] jraph|3 years ago|reply
And the official installer is going to provide the non-free firmware now (and non-free firmware will also be in a separate non-free-firmware section of the repositories so you won't need to enable the whole non-free section anymore)
https://www.phoronix.com/news/Debian-12-Installer-Alpha-2
[+] [-] KronisLV|3 years ago|reply
Curiously, I've had regular Debian updates also mess up my install, to where it cannot boot: https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken/debian-and-...
That said, both Debian and Ubuntu have been passable in my experience, both on the desktop and for servers, basically the whole DEB group of distros including something like Linux Mint and others on the desktop as a daily driver.
I might be an outlier, but they've generally let me get things done more quickly and easily when compared to something like CentOS, RHEL, Oracle Linux and so on (though Fedora on the desktop was generally pretty good). On RPM distros things tended to go wrong, everything from using Docker instead of Podman for Docker Swarm in some smaller projects not being entirely supported (even when Podman didn't have feature parity), some oddness when setting up K3s clusters because I didn't have resources for OpenShift or whatever, regular Docker networking failing and needing to add masquerading to firewall configuration, issues with SELinux not playing nicely with some software, kswapd utterly killing the CPU when the system is running low on swap and others.
> Also, especially for startups, there are often efficiencies to using Debian Stable for everything for which it can be used. For example, it's not the smallest base of a bespoke Docker container, but there are development and operations (personnel) efficiencies when containers, host servers, and workstations are all running the same thing. Fewer surprises in production, less time and complexity trying to support multiple environments, and you can rapidly debug some things more easily on bare metal on workstation when necessary.
I actually moved over my container images to Ubuntu as well, so that I can setup dev environments on the desktop directly the same way I would for a container (sometimes debugging inside of containers is a pain): https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/using-ubuntu-as-the-base-fo...
So now I'm basically running the setup you're describing (the same OS locally, on servers and also in containers) even if I've settled on Ubuntu LTS instead because of the longer EOL and it's been a great experience so far! That said, the whole snaps/Flatpak/AppImage situation could be a bit better.
[+] [-] r_hoods_ghost|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwway1922|3 years ago|reply
It is not that any employee can just purchase things in academia (at least in 3 different countries I worked at). Most money and purchasing power, approvals go to official-administrators (even if Professors take efforts to apply and receive grants). Spending is highly regulated. There were times I was denied buying RHEL telling me to use a 'free linux'. There is a wide belief (among official-administrators) Linux is free so paying for it is the employee wasting money. To even encourage Dell's linux server offerings I once purchased a few preinstalled RHEL devices but was later asked why not use free ones (or the windows dell offerings as they were strangely cheaper - thanks to bloatware).
At the same if you say you need to buy a windows server or zoom license this will be approved as these people know that it is not free. Their society is conditioned in this way.
In the rare case if this was approved, usually there are external auditors that analyse spent money and come back at you for not using free linux.
Ideally Canonical and RedHat (via IBM) goes to these administrators (or meetings in Ministry of Education) and advise them that making software is $$.
[+] [-] Barrin92|3 years ago|reply
The entire tone of the article is kind of weird given how conspiratorial in bold letters it states:
>"Which is to say, Ubuntu exists to make money for Canonical"
Yes, it's a company that pays developers and provides the long term support that the author likes, of course they exist to make money.
[+] [-] srvmshr|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] octotoad|3 years ago|reply
A quick web search returns articles claiming the company has been profitable since 2018 and that an IPO may be in the works. I can understand how something like Red Hat has managed to survive over the past twenty years, given the name it has built for itself in the "enterprise" Linux world (for better or worse), but Canonical continuing to operate off the back of Ubuntu has always baffled me.
[+] [-] WastingMyTime89|3 years ago|reply
It isn’t to me. People keep using what they are familiar with on their servers. Plus it’s one of the default option at most hosting provider.
[+] [-] andrewstuart|3 years ago|reply
This post seems to imply them at canonical is some sort of evil overlord.
If you don’t like the ads, go to a different distro - that’s the good thing about Linux, theres a distro to suit everyone.
[+] [-] teekert|3 years ago|reply
One thing I would like: Ubuntu Declarative Donkey, come on, get some inspiration from NixOS, make it simpler, it's time.
[+] [-] bubblethink|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BiteCode_dev|3 years ago|reply
Not every project can be as amazing as debian and run strong for so many years on volonteers alone.
[+] [-] pabs3|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brucethemoose2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reacharavindh|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AstixAndBelix|3 years ago|reply
what are you referring to? do you mean packages shipped on your distro are broken because the maintainers didn't change the paths or do you mean that pre-compiled binaries don't work?
because, I mean, the whole point of open source is that you can personally get your hands dirty and change the stuff. if you use binaries instead of compiling then that's what you get unfortunately
[+] [-] ta1243|3 years ago|reply
If I start an AWS windows, rhel or suse EC2 I pay far more than with ubuntu. I'm not sure if the Ubuntu AMI has any "software" charge, but RHEL on a t3.large is 14.32c/hour in US-East-2, Ubuntu is 8.32c/hour.
[+] [-] low_tech_love|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] planede|3 years ago|reply
The thing with testing is that security wise it's the worst of both unstable and stable. It does not get timely security fixes from upstream, nor from security backports to stable.
[+] [-] KyeRussell|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ramboldio|3 years ago|reply
Most importantly that would be running a VM for MS Office, Adobe and Autodesk without all the friction of having a complete desktop inside another window, managing shared folders etc etc. I'm already paying VMWare $80/yr for a shitty experience and would be glad to switch.
Alternativley, just charge for premium support for individuals that actually helps out.
I'm not a financial advisor, but is running ads and bothering people with all this snap BS really the best strategy they can came up with?
[+] [-] fs111|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pxc|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rlpb|3 years ago|reply
I've been around in Free Software since the nineties. At that time, it seemed very much a hobbyist effort and entirely outside the commercial world. I liked the idea of empowering users, but as much as I wanted the model to be successful, it was unclear if it was sustainable. There were plenty of naysayers.
Back then there were a bunch of new companies trying to find a business model around Free Software. Many folded. Canonical is one of the few still standing.
There's a huge bunch of work that's needed to maintain a distribution that people tend not to volunteer for, but that still needs doing. Having a functional business model allows this work to get done.
So yes, of course Ubuntu is a commercial product. The commercial side is needed to fund the free side. How this is done is a delicate balance, but how Canonical has negotiated this seems to be OK because it's one of the few still left standing. Better that than nothing at all.
Debian is a bit of an exception, but it doesn't properly work as a counterexample because a number of Debian Developers are employed by Canonical whose work also goes into Debian, and the non-DDs at Canonical working on Ubuntu also send a firehose of patches to Debian. I wouldn't claim that Debian couldn't stand on its without this contribution, but equally one can't really discount it either.
Speculation that Ubuntu will move what it has provided for free to a paywall or a subscription wall seems unhelpful to me, given that this has never actually happened in its history. The speculation seems to arise, and Canonical/Ubuntu is getting this current flak, for having dared to provide more.
[+] [-] noobermin|3 years ago|reply
I don't know what the right answer is. Clearly some sort of balance has worked for both Red Hat (although that is shifting) and Canonical, it's just a question of whether pulling too hard into things people feel is scummy will stand the test of time.
[+] [-] bonzini|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bubblethink|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] botanical|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zurrrrr|3 years ago|reply
If you're a more technical user, no reason to run it since you can have something leaner and more fine-tuned and customized to you're needed.
But if you're not a technical user, it's probably perfect as it gets less in the way from whatever spreadsheet or document or web work you have to do.
The compromise is of course the bloat and all the stuff running under the surface to make all that work.
Different distros for different use cases.
[+] [-] timbit42|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pabe|3 years ago|reply
Slick, consistent UX. Smooth upgrades. Didn't have an issue for years.
Tried Manjaro but that has shown to create considerably more work than Ubuntu.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] imtemplain|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]