Ubuntu's path to success in the cloud was building an audience of kids, students, and experimenters of other kinds who went on to work in IT and software develo

Ubuntu's path to success in the cloud was building an audience of kids, students, and experimenters of other kinds who went on to work in IT and software development later in their lives/careers. When they had choices of what to deploy, they saw that what they 'grew up with' was available and had comprehensive support, and they gladly went for it. Maybe Ubuntu/Canonical's position is secure at this point, having cemented themselves as a major brand on the popular cloud environments, in WSL, and as the de facto target platform for popular proprietary software (e.g., Steam, Discord, Slack, Google Chrome, VS Code) among GNU/Linux distributions. But things like embedding ads in APT, the telemetry once built into Unity, and pushing an immature implementation of a containerized app platform with a proprietary repository backend (Snap) have made Ubuntu harder and harder to distinguish— culturally— from the corporate, pushy, stifling, restrictive desktop operating systems available from Microsoft and Apple. Ubuntu is still worlds apart from either of course. But it's no longer the breath of fresh air it once was, in comparison to them. At the same time, Ubuntu no longer stands out as miles ahead in terms of usability or newbie-friendliness. And so for the next generation of tinkerers experimenting with Linux (who might yet become the next generation of Linux developers and Linux sysadmins), Ubuntu has already been largely displaced (chiefly by user-friendly/OOTBE-oriented downstreams of Arch, as it happens) in that place of discovery, experimentation, and pleasure at home. It's not that Ubuntu is a horrible catastrophe all of a sudden. It's that when you've been using a suffocating corporate product for your operating system for your entire life, using an operating system that isn't a product at all is a bit stunning once you realize what you're looking at, like those photos of Pyongyang where advertisements are banned and the bus stops are instead decorated with paintings and photos of natural landscapes. In its early years, Ubuntu still felt like that, despite Canonical's (shifting) hopes for it. I don't know what I hope for in relation to all this, exactly, but I know for sure that if I were growing up learning Linux/Unix/FOSS today, I'd have no interest in Ubuntu.