Let's not hold Canonical up as some kind of paragons of open source. While yes, they're not as bad as Microsoft (which frankly isn't a high bar to clear), and i

Let's not hold Canonical up as some kind of paragons of open source. While yes, they're not as bad as Microsoft (which frankly isn't a high bar to clear), and it seems likely that at the beginning they were enthusiastic supporters, the source code for many of their key services is not open source (unlike e.g. Red Hat), and they have made numerous bad choices over the years (of which the ads were just one example). See the ongoing LXD debacle (https://lwn.net/Articles/940684/ https://lwn.net/Articles/940684/) for a recent example. Back in the late 2000s/early 2010s, Canonical/Ubuntu did good work fixing up lingering issues (e.g. their 100 papercuts program), but for whatever reason (maybe the people left) that was replaced by an era where have they tried to produce alternatives to what everyone else was using, and failing badly. Maybe if they went back to their origins then things might improve, but I suspect they've lost that culture, and they've become the linux distro most matching the trajectory of Google.