Ubuntu was a critical part of the Linux ecosystem for many years. It is probably the first distro of many of us (myself included).
But last ~10 years have not been kind to Canonical. They are losing ground everywhere, and they are no longer the engine of Linux adoption that they used to be. Others have taken over.
This could lead to an early demise of Linux Mint. It’s great we have LMDE ready
It’s not as if Canonical hasn’t already enshittified. I don’t think going public is going to change that much.
Canonical isn’t the first Linux company to go through the IPO. I wouldn’t worry about that and overestimate their influence in the broad community.
It won’t. Well. Perhaps some distros might see new users/customers when everyone’s abandoning Ubuntu.
There used to be a lot more public open source companies but a lot of them were bought out. Sun Microsystems, Novell, Silicon Graphics, RedHat, Caldera, Oracle, etc. all are or were companies that made open source software and were publicly traded.
Probably very little, its like how rehl being a commercial product doesn’t mean fedora isn’t open source. In the absolute worst case scenario distros can switch their base to Debian unstable.
- Take Debian
- Make it worse
- ???
- IPO
It would be nice if the most of the money went into things that would help the linux ecosystem (I know canonical contributes to debian, sometimes makes usability improvements, and isn’t all negative). But it’ll probably just go into AI bullshit.
The second argument is false… How it’s worse? It’s definitely different… They did some user friendly improvements, for people who are not want barebones Linux. They take care of the most stuff you need, so you can focus on your work. Before you came with snap argument. Think how much it’s matter for normal user how they installing software? If they want JetBrains IDE, just go into store and install JetBrains IDE. Ubuntu was and will be for user who don’t care and want their system to work. They even implemented Dock and systray for GNOME, so people can use system as it’s normal even on GNOME xd
Im one of those people that’s still pissed off about when they had amazon ads in the OS by default. Even though it was like 10 years ago. Like, id hit the wondows button and start typing “firefox” and see an ad for a firepit from amazon.
Oh yeah, then i went back to it ~5 years ago until the snap packages pissed me off too much
Debian is much easier now than it was 15 years ago, and some of that is thanks to canonical. Im not actually anti ubuntu, but they will always make weird choices to annoy people like me
You can’t satisfy every person on the planet xd There are always people with different view on different things… Amazon ads were 10+ years ago… Snaps still but not everyone hates it. I don’t for example. Canonical is a corporation which trying to make money. Of course. But at least they are doing it keeping Ubuntu free, and survive in this world where you can’t do nothing without money. FOSS people basically pays nothing for things they are using. So it’s nothing wrong Canonical trying to monetize their work.
Critical support of Ubuntu is my position lol
Inside me are two penguins, one of them wants Canonical to be more like redhat, the other wants Canonical less like redhat
When Canonical partnered with Microsoft to work on WSL, I figured Caninical was gaining something too: like tips how to license and sell Ubuntu instead of being free.
Sell? Why not just a monthly subscription to keep open software free?
Sorry, yes we do sales, so sell also means a SaaS subscription. That was my implied meaning of seeking Ubuntu to Users.
So now you have a free update, but a note if you want certain security patches you have to pay for Pro
Affect other distros?
Hopefully, they’ll all get something better then cloud-init.
Canonical pumps out dumb stuff.
More money into Linux? Probably a good thing in the grand scheme of things. I’d avoid Ubuntu though.
Doesn’t going public mean it’d probably stop being open source?
Going public just means that the shares will be traded on a public market (stock market) rather than being held privately. So anyone who wants to buy shares can. There are some legal requirements to be publicly traded, largely regarding public disclosure of finances and assets.
The major difference would be that suddenly anyone who wants to have a say in how they are run can buy shares, and if they buy enough shares, they can pressure leadership in to making decisions they would not have otherwise made. also, people buying the shares probably will want to see their shares increase in value, and thus leadership will be pressured to please the stock market hive mind. Potentially it opens them up to a hostile takeover where some outside group buys up enough shares to replaces the leadership with people they want in charge.
OpenSource is different than Free OpenSource
Not necessarily, Red Hat is a public company and their software is open source.
In Canonical’s case, it being open source is an asset, it gives users transparency.
Red hat isn’t a publicly traded company, but they are owned by a publicly traded company (IBM)
Oh no! Anyway …
Snap is like the IE of the Linux world but worse (IE at least installs <INSERT_BROWSER_HERE>). Nothing is lost.
Well, Mint could just fall back to LMDE if Ubuntu starts going the same direction as RHEL and starts account-walling their source code and blocking redistribution under the penalty of an account ban, but I don’t know about other Ubuntu clones.
Look at rocky linux and alma linux even if they restrict code, ubuntu foss won’t die, but debian base seem more sustainable.
Many Debian developers work for Ubuntu IIRC.
But KDE Neon :(
Kde is building their own non ubuntu Linux distro, pretty cool imo
Oooh, what is it called? Does it have a name yet?
Note that KDE Linux is completely different from Neon:
- Arch-based
- Immutable
/usris a read-only, atomically updatederofsvolume backed by a single file, allowing rollback to any of the last 5 OS images- No system package management allowed, only Flatpak, AppImage, distrobox, etc
I love the direction they’re going with it, but I personally won’t be running it because I like to tinker.
https://linux.kde.org/#what-kind-of-base-technology-does-kde-linux-use
They disagree with calling it arch based:
What kind of base technology does KDE Linux use?
KDE Linux is an “immutable base OS” Linux distro created using Arch Linux packages, but it should not be considered an “Arch-based distro”; Arch is simply a means to an end, and KDE Linux doesn’t even ship with the pacman package manager.
KDE Linux leans on Systemd for a great deal of functionality. Updates are atomic and image-based, with the last 5 OS images cached on disk. Only the Wayland session is supported. Apps primarily come from Flatpak.
Learn more about KDE Linux’s architecture.
I probably won’t use it for the simple fact that it will likely use the rolling release style of updates. I am more of a stable release fella myself, so I think I’ll stick to LMDE.
Yeah KDE linux
