I know in the UK margins tend to be high on things like glasses and lenses but they lose money on even standard eye tests (it’s worse if they pick something wrong and need to do further investigation)

None of which makes the distro shite. The things I remember them getting shit for are:

Unity/mir

Upstart

Snaps

Amazon ads

Advertising their premium version.

Of all of those the Amazon thing is the only one I have a strong objection to. The rest I can’t say I’ve even particularly noticed the changes if I’m honest and most other Ubuntu users probably haven’t either. They seem to get a lot of crap for “doing their own thing all the time” which seems odd coming from the Linux community.

I came to Ubuntu initially because it was the new hotness, I’ve never really had an issue with it functionally in 12 years or so, so no real need to change.

Why not deb? Why not any number of other distros? I do run deb on my NAS as it goes and I’m not trying to stan for Ubuntu (honestly) but it gets a lot of undeserved hate. It’s not a super exciting distro or anything but it tends to work fine for me.

Really? They did a ton of work to make Linux accessible to the masses, have an active and helpful community to help out if you get stuck, works really well out of the box on most hardware and you’re pretty much guaranteed there’s going to be a compatible deb available for it if you’re looking for software outside normal repos. Seems like a no brainer tbh.

You’re surprised the most popular desktop distro is still around?