You bring up some good points. One of the things I've always loved about Linux is that the underlying system doesn't usually matter. As long as things are POSIX compatible, they seem to run fine. But, at least for a while, it seemed that Canonical really wanted to break away from the Linux ecosystem. Do you remember when they didn't even want to call themselves 'Linux' anymore? They just wanted to be known as 'Ubuntu'. I know that's a small thing to some but it signaled something very had to me.

As for their stance on free software, I'm 'alright' with them being somewhat captialistic. In fact, I even support proprietary software on Linux in some cases, But that software should still be as universal as possible. It shouldn't run on Ubuntu. It should run on Linux. Why lock me into a distro? Isn't that as bad as Microsoft at that point?

Lastly, I have to agree with your n00b friendly statement. While Ubuntu is a popular distro, Manjaro and other Arch based distro's seem to sit much better with new users long term. I'm not really sure why that is nor can I really blame Ubuntu for that but I've always found it weird.

Thanks for the follow!