Ubuntu still needs to make money and serve some kind of audience. They have a philosophy and goals as an organization. Writing software that no one will ever us

Ubuntu still needs to make money and serve some kind of audience. They have a philosophy and goals as an organization. Writing software that no one will ever use does not serve their organization. If a feature is just going to go to a black hole it is a waste of their time. There is no real problem for the community, but there is a problem for Ubuntu. Also, I think you could argue that there are, effectively, gatekeepers for the most important projects (Linus/Linux, etc.). Totally agree about the privacy concerns of Windows 10. I would even say with Sierra I have definite privacy concerns for macOS. The direction is more and more in the walled garden direction for macOS and I do not like it one bit. I ditched Apple/Win for a Linux system even though it meant several weekends of tweaking to get a Linux laptop correct. An amusing anecdote regarding that, I think a lot of the time cost is just knowing which things work well on Linux. Things are not always "seamless" on Windows or macOS and once you know how to configure a Linux software stack into a productive desktop environment it doesn't cost you that much more than any other OS. Thing is, most folks make an effort to migrate over and conflate two separate things of learning the hardware and the actually dysfunctional Linux desktop things with finding software that is similar to what they are using on macOS.