I’m out of the loop, canonical is IPOing?
this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2026
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Ubuntu was a critical part of the Linux ecosystem for many years. It is probably the first distro of many of us (myself included).
But last ~10 years have not been kind to Canonical. They are losing ground everywhere, and they are no longer the engine of Linux adoption that they used to be. Others have taken over.
I always felt like Canonical had a big problem with going all-in on something they thought was neat (the Unity desktop, Mir, that thing where phones and desktops were supposed to merge, now Snaps) and letting everything else stagnate, then getting the thing they were working on to the point where it was almost good, then dumping it and going after the next shiny thing.
But yeah these days I think things like Pop!OS and Mint are better Ubuntus than Ubuntu is.
This could lead to an early demise of Linux Mint. It's great we have LMDE ready
Canonical isn't the first Linux company to go through the IPO. I wouldn't worry about that and overestimate their influence in the broad community.
It's not as if Canonical hasn't already enshittified. I don't think going public is going to change that much.
It won't. Well. Perhaps some distros might see new users/customers when everyone's abandoning Ubuntu.
- Take Debian
- Make it worse
- ???
- IPO
It would be nice if the most of the money went into things that would help the linux ecosystem (I know canonical contributes to debian, sometimes makes usability improvements, and isn't all negative). But it'll probably just go into AI bullshit.
The second argument is false... How it's worse? It's definitely different... They did some user friendly improvements, for people who are not want barebones Linux. They take care of the most stuff you need, so you can focus on your work. Before you came with snap argument. Think how much it's matter for normal user how they installing software? If they want JetBrains IDE, just go into store and install JetBrains IDE. Ubuntu was and will be for user who don't care and want their system to work. They even implemented Dock and systray for GNOME, so people can use system as it's normal even on GNOME xd
Im one of those people that's still pissed off about when they had amazon ads in the OS by default. Even though it was like 10 years ago. Like, id hit the wondows button and start typing "firefox" and see an ad for a firepit from amazon.
Oh yeah, then i went back to it ~5 years ago until the snap packages pissed me off too much
Debian is much easier now than it was 15 years ago, and some of that is thanks to canonical. Im not actually anti ubuntu, but they will always make weird choices to annoy people like me
Snaps are unironically a good packaging format and it would be best for majority of users to be using them. Stronger sandboxing than flatpack, auto updating by default(huge for user security), easier for developers to package their apps.
You can't satisfy every person on the planet xd There are always people with different view on different things... Amazon ads were 10+ years ago.... Snaps still but not everyone hates it. I don't for example. Canonical is a corporation which trying to make money. Of course. But at least they are doing it keeping Ubuntu free, and survive in this world where you can't do nothing without money. FOSS people basically pays nothing for things they are using. So it's nothing wrong Canonical trying to monetize their work.
Critical support of Ubuntu is my position lol
You can love it or hate. Nothing wrong with it xd Every people have their own opinions on different things. That's a reason why not every one can be satisfied :) The good is that, we have more distros than people actually using it xd So everyone can find his own home :)
Thankfully I missed the amazon ads.
If only snap worked as well as flatpak. Not one snap package I have installed (Kubuntu) has worked, even the snap FF went wonky within 3 days of a fresh distro install. Flatpak works better as I have not had a single issue with any flatpak install (I refuse to look at how big these files are) I just like the idea of sand boxing all these apps. As of now my preferred install is 1. flatpak, 2. .deb, 3. compile the bitch from source, the only one I have had to compile was the "Drivers" for my and my gfs G13 keyboards so we could assign the keys we want.
Inside me are two penguins, one of them wants Canonical to be more like redhat, the other wants Canonical less like redhat
When Canonical partnered with Microsoft to work on WSL, I figured Caninical was gaining something too: like tips how to license and sell Ubuntu instead of being free.
Sell? Why not just a monthly subscription to keep open software free?
Sorry, yes we do sales, so sell also means a SaaS subscription. That was my implied meaning of seeking to sell Ubuntu to Users.
So now you have a free update, but a note if you want certain security patches you have to pay for Pro
There used to be a lot more public open source companies but a lot of them were bought out. Sun Microsystems, Novell, Silicon Graphics, RedHat, Caldera, Oracle, etc. all are or were companies that made open source software and were publicly traded.
Well, Mint could just fall back to LMDE if Ubuntu starts going in the same direction as RHEL and starts account-walling their source code and blocking redistribution under the penalty of an account ban, but I don't know about other Ubuntu clones.
Look at rocky linux and alma linux even if they restrict code, ubuntu foss won't die, but debian base seem more sustainable.
Many Debian developers work for Ubuntu IIRC.
But KDE Neon :(
Kde is building their own non ubuntu Linux distro, pretty cool imo
Oooh, what is it called? Does it have a name yet?
Note that KDE Linux is completely different from Neon:
- Arch-based
- Immutable
/usris a read-only, atomically updatederofsvolume backed by a single file, allowing rollback to any of the last 5 OS images- No system package management allowed, only Flatpak, AppImage, distrobox, etc
I love the direction they're going with it, but I personally won't be running it because I like to tinker.
https://linux.kde.org/#what-kind-of-base-technology-does-kde-linux-use
They disagree with calling it arch based:
What kind of base technology does KDE Linux use?
KDE Linux is an “immutable base OS” Linux distro created using Arch Linux packages, but it should not be considered an “Arch-based distro”; Arch is simply a means to an end, and KDE Linux doesn’t even ship with the pacman package manager.
KDE Linux leans on Systemd for a great deal of functionality. Updates are atomic and image-based, with the last 5 OS images cached on disk. Only the Wayland session is supported. Apps primarily come from Flatpak.
Learn more about KDE Linux’s architecture.
They can disagree, but if I take your recipe and then change it, no matter how much, my starting point is still based on your recipe….
Absolutely, it looks like it's mostly managing expectations that come with calling something arch based.
In your recipe analogy, calling your new cookie recipe, which you based on your granny's chocolate chip cookie recipe, "chocolate chip cookie based", but ending up with a raisin cookie (you removed the chocolate chips) would be false advertising, even if technically true in the way you describe.
I probably won't use it for the simple fact that it will likely use the rolling release style of updates. I am more of a stable release fella myself, so I think I'll stick to LMDE.
Yeah KDE linux
Probably very little, its like how rehl being a commercial product doesn't mean fedora isn't open source. In the absolute worst case scenario distros can switch their base to Debian unstable.
Affect other distros?
Hopefully, they'll all get something better then cloud-init.
Canonical pumps out dumb stuff.
More money into Linux? Probably a good thing in the grand scheme of things. I'd avoid Ubuntu though.
Doesn't going public mean it'd probably stop being open source?
That's a good question.
Short answer, no.
Long answer, Jeff Gerling did a great blog on Red Hat restricting access to its flagship RHEL while still providing upstream access. https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/clearing-fud-surrounding-red-hats-actions/
Going public just means that the shares will be traded on a public market (stock market) rather than being held privately. So anyone who wants to buy shares can. There are some legal requirements to be publicly traded, largely regarding public disclosure of finances and assets.
The major difference would be that suddenly anyone who wants to have a say in how they are run can buy shares, and if they buy enough shares, they can pressure leadership in to making decisions they would not have otherwise made. also, people buying the shares probably will want to see their shares increase in value, and thus leadership will be pressured to please the stock market hive mind. Potentially it opens them up to a hostile takeover where some outside group buys up enough shares to replaces the leadership with people they want in charge.
Not necessarily, Red Hat is a public company and their software is open source.
In Canonical's case, it being open source is an asset, it gives users transparency.
Red hat isn’t a publicly traded company, but they are owned by a publicly traded company (IBM)
OpenSource is different than Free OpenSource
Snap is like the IE of the Linux world but worse (IE at least installs <INSERT_BROWSER_HERE>). Nothing is lost.
Oh no! Anyway …