this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2025
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You do not seriously think all canonical has done is snaps and Gnome.
Is building one of the most popular linux desktop environments and distros not enough to sell a paid support package to the users who want it? I dont think thats unfair.
No, I was genuienly asking.
Yep, they make a distro.
Lots of orgs make distros.
This isn't a decade ago, when Ubuntu was ... leagues more generally user friendly than most other distros.
What do they do for the broader linux ecosystem, outside of their own distro, other than snaps?
You said they contribute to the ecosystem.
How do they do that?
Hardware support and working with manufacturers to bring linux support, vendor support bringing mainstream apps to linux, advertising linux laptops and getting it in front of people all around the world, Wayland, gnome, accessibility, a ton shit way to much to list. Just because the improvements are done for Ubuntu doesnt mean they arent useful on other distros. Its free software after all the rising tide lifts all boats. Canonical arent a huge mega corp raking in cash. They cant compare to giants like redhat.
I'll grant you that they are not redhat, but again, tons of other teams behind other distros do some or all of what you just mentioned.
And... almost all, if not nearly all of them, do not monetize their OS.
Is... Canonical uniquely important, in some way?
Poof them out of existence, and what, outside of their own direct projects, breaks?
Which ones dont monetize their OS? Its not that they are uniquely important. Its that its perfectly fine to monetize their own os. They are selling a service that is additional support for users that want it. Pretty simple stuff, you see users asking for this stuff all the time.
Why shouldn't they be able to offer additional paid support for their own distro? Why does it matter
How is this relevant at all?
Uh, basically 0 Linux distros monetize their OS.
There are a lot of linux distros, and the few that do monetize their OS are the exception to the rule.
The vast majority of Linux OSs... they're not selling a product or service like Windows.
The... code... is open source.
That means anyone can, and people often do, copy the entire thing, make some tweaks, kablamo!
New Linux OS.
Its kinda the whole point of libre software.
It doesn't operate by the norms of propietary software, profit motives.
As to your second part... you are the one claiming Canonical does some significant service for or to Linux as a whole.
Ok, so, I used to run and admin dbs and such.
Sometimes, a thing you can do, if you think some system or subsystem is just broken or useless or is already effectively fully deprecated...
Well, you build up your new alternative, tell people to switch over to it, and then one day you just turn off the old system, unnannounced.
Then, if you get flooded with emails from people ssying they can't do their work for some reason, you now know all these goobers have not been paying attention to their team lead and your emails telling them to switch away from Old System, for the past 3 months.
You just yank it out and see what breaks.
And if nothing really breaks... then why were we spending time and money keeping it working?
So, if we view all of Linux as a larger ecosystem, and we yank out Canonical...
What, in the larger ecosystem, breaks?
You are the one who said they do very importsnt things for the ecosystem.
To which I again say: Such as?
If they are important, things would strain or break if they disappeared.
If they can disappear and no one outside of Ubuntu users notices... then... they were not important to the larger ecosystem.
Majority of linux users are on a monetized OS. Consultancy, extended service, feature implementation, fast support, donations, merch are all common monetisation methods across major linux distros and there is nothing wrong with any of them.
There are very few distros funded solely by the maintainers they are usually hobby projects.
They invented a solution to sell user data to Amazon, does that count?
They also have a bunch of knock-off products like canonical aws, canonical terraform-ansible, canonical k8s, etc.
It was crap a decade ago that's why everyone was already installing mint, and only slightly less crap almost 2 decades ago. I installed Linux for the first time around 2006, and Ubuntu was no different than one of the first versions of opensuse. The whole "Ubuntu is for beginners" hype was literally all due to them sending free install CDs.
Hah, fair enough, I was still a Linux n00b back in even 2012.
I have tried to study the history I missed in retrospect, but it sounds like you just directly experienced it starting from an earlier point in time than I did.
Oh so was I. During the early opensuse I was a teen playing with new toys after reading about Linux in a pc mag. I've only started seriously using Linux around 2010-2013.
Oh you mean the DE they abandoned almost 10 years ago?
Is selling user data to Amazon and harvesting data illegally from Azure VMs not enough for users to tell them to stick their terminal ads up their ass? I don't think that's unfair.
Fuck off Tankie, I will not fall for your concern trolling bait today.
I mean, I also dislike tankies, but simply having a .ml user account does not automatically make someone a tankie.
Also, they're not concern trolling.
What they brought up is highly, directly relevant, and it also is not a hypothetical, its ... just reality.
I don't think you know what 'tankie' or 'concern trolling' mean.
I know that guy is a crazy tankie, I've see him around. What he brought up is a bunch of shit intended to waste time. He doesnt care about any of those things so trying to argue is a waste of time and most of its untrue or misleading.
When you can't call upon reason, invent ad hominems. Get some help buddy.
... then just block him, if you don't enjoy interacting with him?
But also, nothing he's said here is untrue or misleading.
Its, again, quite relevant to a discussion of Canonincal's business practices and how they contribute to Linux more broadly.
If you don't know, about a decade ago, Canonical kind of fucked over GNOME, said they'd make their own DE, and then basically never did.
Hence my earlier quip about Canonical being the reason GNOME devs are... lets say, very strong willed and set in their ways, these days.
GNOME != Canonical.
The only actual numbers I can find are that Canonical donates $120k a year to all other open source projects, but I can't find any breakdown of how much of that $120k goes to GNOME, or what all of those projects are.
... This is part of why I was asking if you could clarify for me, what it is that Canonical does exactly, in terms of helping out the Linux ecosystem.
Ok shill. Where's your canonical DE?
Oh, uh, that's over at PopOS!, who are basically actually doing / trying to do what Canonical said they were gonna do, 5-10 years ago.
Oh I know, just making fun of the shill.