I’d say it’s even worse than that. I’d be willing to pay for a Linux distro (and have donated in the past), but, in their pursuit of user lock-in and/or profit, Ubuntu and RedHat are increasingly hostile toward desktop users. Therefore, my money goes to smaller projects without many (any?) full time developers.
>I’d be willing to pay for a Linux distro (and have donated in the past), but, in their pursuit of user lock-in and/or profit, Ubuntu and RedHat are increasingly hostile toward desktop users.
It's almost certainly profit. They have a sizable user base but not a lot of good ways of getting money out of them. I would say it's a direct example of the major unsolved problem I was talking about. This is not to condone what they did, as I found the Ubuntu advertisements particularly egregious.
I'd be happy to push work to pay for a supported Linux distro, and I have had some success before in pushing companies to choose supported open source options.
I was in fact hoping that Ubuntu would be that distro a number of years ago until they pivoted away from easy, nice, clean, just works towards halfway bad copy of OS X.
Now another frustrating thing about this is that once many open source projects get to taste the sweet juice of cashflow it seems many will immediately abandon all the ideas that got me to desperately want to suppprt them and become just as hard to work with as their commercial counterparts.
