Ubuntu Pro is of course aimed at enterprise users, and here it makes perfect sense to use it. ISO27001 compliance, CIS-Level evaluation with the Ubuntu Security Guide, 10 year security maintenance, live kernel updates for less downtime, better AD integration, automatic software deployment, 24/7 support, etc. These things matter in a company setting.
I'm noticing a retracing of the path redhat took in creating RHEL, which is currently dominant as far as paid installs of Linux. I'm not an Ubuntu person by any means but it's easy to connect the dots looking back on how RHEL happened, and I could see how Canonical looks at this as their chance to be the quasi Debian side of the enterprise linux picture.
Yes, and I think their chances are not bad at all. RHEL is the safe&boring choice for your run-of-the-mill web/file/DB server, I don't think there's any doubt about that. I think however Ubuntu is much better positioned for clients, like Linux laptops for software devs. A new LTS every two years with up-to-date software, the ISO/CIS compliance stuff makes InfoSec happy, the deployment/AD integration features make IT happy, and lots of choice for Ubuntu certified laptops from the big enterprise vendors (Dell, Lenovo, HP, etc.) make procurement happy, so I think it is a really attractive choice for a company. And once you have Ubuntu Pro for these machines, why not use it on the server as well, especially since it's cheaper than RHEL.
Better out-of-the-box desktop experience. Last time I tried Debian for desktop, I tried for 4 hours to get my bluetooth headphones to work. In Linux Mint (or Ubuntu) they just worked out-of-the-box.
They work out of the box on Debian now too. Ubuntu used to do all sorts of upstream work to make Debian unstable work better, but nowadays Debian is on par with Ubuntu for post-install usability.
I installed Ubuntu recently and my experience definitely wasn't "it just works", getting constant notifications that applications need to be restarted to update and multiple "Ubuntu has failed" popups (which seem to mean literally nothing) don't feel like it's just working to me. It actually seems like everything the OS does is janky in some way.
Even putting the OS aside I believe some of the jank is caused by Ubuntu's insistence on trying to usurp applications installed via apt to instead install them via snap. This is why my Firefox install wont allow me to copy text at random, and why I can't drag and drop files into Telegram, and why every file I download has to be dug up from some deep .snap/ directory before any other application can actually load it.
Except the advantage of not having ads in the command line and not having confusing messages that some security updates have been withheld unless you sign up for a pro version.
When I adopted Ubuntu, it was 2004 or so, and the difference from Debian was night-and-day. In fact, it was cks who recommended Ubuntu to me, after listening to various woes with the audio subsystem. I was trying to attack these hardware/driver issues one-by-one and he just said "Install Ubuntu, and be done with it!" and he was right: as soon as I installed Ubuntu, all my commodity hardware just worked, and my concerns became much higher-level, and I was a satisfied Ubuntu user for about 18 years afterward.
I did vow to migrate to Debian eventually. It never completely happened, as my Lenovo went to Fedora and I eventually decided to eliminate Linux entirely from my home network. But nowadays, Debian is totally mature and able to tackle modern hardware much better than it could in 2004, and I believe that this is attributable to a lot of packaging and integration work by Canonical.
