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.
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.
This isn’t a decade ago, when Ubuntu was … leagues more generally user friendly than most other distros.
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.
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?
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.