Long-time (and current) Ubuntu daily-driver here. When I first started dabbling 20 years ago, Ubuntu had unparalleled out-of-the-box driver support for things that required third-party drivers. It gave them an era of dominance that had a secondary effect of “if I have a Linux problem and Google it, Ubuntu guides are the most likely to exist” which kept me using it to this day. Is it the best? Probably not, but I have twenty years of automation built around it and it’s comfortable.
The people that still use it today are the functional tinkerers. I don’t generally engage with these threads because I assume that every user making these posts isn’t searching for the answers that are already out there in previous threads. The paths that lead to Ubuntu aren’t the same paths that the “I use arch btw” people take. It’s a case of the kinds of users that choose Ubuntu, don’t go out of their way to interject that they’re Linux people. We’re just regular people that don’t want an adversarial relationship with our operating system.
Snap, esm, Ubuntu pro, they all get out of your way with a simple command or single line in a config file, and they respect the same signaling they’ve used since each product’s inception. I want a product that is both open-source and financially sustainable, because it leads to stability in my life. If windows had easily togglable telemetry and functional automation I would never have switched in the first place.
I like the long-term overlapping security release that server-first focus gives me. I rely on it even. My daily driver is built from Ubuntu server headless LTS, X11, Awesomewm. My automation really only needs updates every 5 years, and I get the option to update it every 2. The same script I wrote to remove the esm motd message 10 years ago still works. I don’t know what else people want from canonical.