How does Canonical benefit Ubuntu's users from a technical standpoint?

[donald187]

I was just wondering about what Canonical does for its Ubuntu users to protect or benefit them. I'm referring to the distribution itself. For example, the root account is disabled. Or the use of AppArmor to protect certain applications by default. Another one is the HWE kernel track which allows the LTS versions to be used on newer hardware but upon an upgrade switches to the Generic track for stability.

Anything else that I haven't thought about or am unaware of?

[ian-weisser]

That seems a fairly wide-open question. The definitions of "benefits" could be stretched.

Benefit: There are the months of integration and bugfixing by Canonical-paid engineers before each release.

Protect: There is the Ubuntu Security Team, Canonical-paid engineers tracking CVEs, testing and uploading patches in a timely manner.

[donald187]

That seems a fairly wide-open question. The definitions of "benefits" could be stretched.

Benefit: There are the months of integration and bugfixing by Canonical-paid engineers before each release.

Protect: There is the Ubuntu Security Team, Canonical-paid engineers tracking CVEs, testing and uploading patches in a timely manner.

Thanks. Yeah, I wasn't sure how to phrase it so I tried to define it by example.

A couple of other things: Ease of use and hardware support. Ubuntu is intended to be user friendly and to support a lot of hardware. I've heard that Canonical will work with hardware vendors so that Ubuntu is supported but that may be rumor. I know that Dell even releases computers with Ubuntu preinstalled. They also have online instructions for installing Ubuntu on Dell computers.

https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000131655/how-to-install-ubuntu-linux-on-your-dell-pc

[ian-weisser]

Benefit: Canonical-paid engineering team in Taiwan that tests hardware volunteered by OEMs, helps build kernel patches for new hardware, upstreams those patches, and creates OEM-specific kernels.

Benefit: Canonical-provided infrastructure for support and community platforms: UbuntuForums, AskUbuntu, Ubuntu Discourse, Launchpad, etc.

[donald187]

There's Ubuntu Pro, free for personal use on up to 5 machines, providing security updates for a total of 10 years.

[grahammechanical]

When was the last time any Ubuntu user (home or corporate) paid for a version of Ubuntu. We are still able to download, install and use Ubuntu without charge. And do that on as many machine we like. That certainly benefits me.

Regards

[donald187]

Ubuntu 24.04 has a dedicated firmware updater now. No longer part of the snap store or Ubuntu Software before that.

[donald187]

Ubuntu 24.04 has a dedicated firmware updater now. No longer part of the snap store or Ubuntu Software before that.

This seems to allow the snap-store process to terminate now when you close the window (unlike the previous snap-store) so it can update as usual so that's nice.