Ubuntu Had A Great Year In Switching To Wayland, Continued Commercial Success

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Ubuntu Had A Great Year In Switching To Wayland, Continued Commercial Success

Ubuntu and parent company Canonical had another great year not only on the Linux desktop but continuing its commercial successes around the server, cloud, and IoT sectors too. Ubuntu 21.04 and 21.10 delivered new features across all fronts this year and developers are now busy preparing for the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release next spring...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-2021-Success

[Azrael5]

Will Ubuntu move on Pipewire?

[motang]

Great to hear that they had a good year, but I think the desktop (which I am a user of) suffered a bit. It was a bit lackluster, but that solidified my stance since I switched away from GNOME to KDE Plasma. Now I am very happy (and will stay that way unlike prior years) Kubuntu user.

[Siuoq]

That #fff colored thing on the picture is real?

[Nth_man]

Great to hear that they had a good year, but I think the desktop (which I am a user of) suffered a bit. It was a bit lackluster, but that solidified my stance since I switched away from GNOME to KDE Plasma. Now I am very happy (and will stay that way unlike prior years) Kubuntu user.

With Kubuntu you can also call a paid technical support. I have not used that technical support, although I can say that my bosses liked that I had that option available.

[skeevy420]

With Kubuntu you can also call a paid technical support.

I have to imagine that this is the answer to 80% of their calls - That issue was fixed in a newer version than what Kubuntu ships with. You need to first either update from LTS to the newest .10 release or enable HWE and after doing one of those you need to install the XYZ PPA for updated KDE builds.

[CommunityMember]

Great to hear that they had a good year, but I think the desktop (which I am a user of) suffered a bit.

Canonical's revenue is in the support of server/cloud space (i.e. enterprise support contracts). Desktop usage may be important to keep users/developers in the fold, but it is not their core revenue stream (and neither is it RedHat's). Canonical is not immune from the requirements to "follow the money" when resources are allocated if they wish to continue to be profitable (TANSTAAFL). For those that can afford it, paying for a support contract for their desktop is a way to both fund development, and be able to open direct issues requesting improvements.

Arguably, in order to optimize for future profitability (with the eventual goal of a successful IPO), just like Canonical abandoned Mir as display server when it was clear Wayland was the industry way, and they moved from upstart to systemd, Canonical should likely abandon Snap in favor of Flatpak to reduce the internal costs for what is essentially a parallel / duplicated effort.

[lyamc]

They’ve already integrated snap, and personally, I hate trying to run flatpaks from the terminal

[AJenbo]

to bad that drag and drop between multiple applications still doesn't work when using Wayalnd

[creative]

I was immediately thinking when I saw Ubuntu+Wayland, those two make the most since together and I see Ubuntu tying in Wayland more seamlessly than any other distribution that I can think of. I kind of wish I had an extra drive just to install Ubuntu's latest stuff to see how things are running. Ubuntu has always had some of the best gaming performance out there.