> Remember when they acquired GitHub, developers were vouching to move over to GitLab. Yet very few did.

GitHub benefits from a powerful network effect: if you want contributions from the greatest number of developers, you need to be on the platform they use and understand.

Ubuntu doesn't have a comparable form of social lock-in. As long as they are popular and until portable and/or containerized package formats for Linux mature, they do exert some network pressure on publishers, but not really end users.

> Ubuntu is so much nicer to use than the competition.

I don't think this has been true for some time. Canonical's server offerings are pretty much coasting on the mindshare that they gained with current-gen Linux sysadmins and developers who grew up experimenting with desktop Linux in the aughts, when the usability delta between Ubuntu and other mainstream distros really was vast.

They still benefit quite a bit from their willingness to bundle proprietary software with the OS, and from sheer inertia on the desktop, where they are still most likely to receive native packages by proprietary software vendors.

But the collection of desktop operating systems that actually attract new users to the ecosystem who will become the next generations of Linux sysadmins is increasingly comprised of distros that are not based on Ubuntu. User-friendly Arch downstreams now have more and more of theml mindshare that Ubuntu did when I was 'growing up.

The most popular Ubuntu-based distribution, which has actually surpassed Ubuntu both in interest from new users and in its reputation for OOTB usability, deviates strongly from Ubuntu in some core technical aspects that make some Ubuntu knowledge non-transferable.

APT is aging poorly, even compared to its RPM-based counterparts. It has recently been at the center of some high profile blowups where package installation triggers a catastrophic cascade of uninstallations that newbies would likely perceive as 'bricking' their installations. This has damaged the reputation of the most popular Ubuntu-based distros, including Ubuntu itself as well at driving home the case for portable/containerized package formats.

The success and growth of these portable package formats, including Snap itself, additionally threaten to undermine Ubuntu's strategic advantage because they work pretty much as well on any distro as they do on Ubuntu.

Moreover, Canonical's own offering in that space is already driving users away from Ubuntu. Snap is slow, clunky, space hungry, and bandwidth hungry, and the way that Ubuntu has chosen to force Snap packages for key software, e.g., Firefox, has had a negative impact even (and perhaps especially) among non-technical users precisely because it has a shitty UX.

Meanwhile Snap has failed to gain much developer interest outside of Canonical, and looks likely to suffer many of the same adoption problems as previous Canonical offerings in the space of core system software like Upstart and Mir. It seems that Canonical has not figured out a way, in the past decade or so, to displace Red Hat as the most influential corporation on projects that require widespread, cross-distro adoption to succeed.

Similarly to the situation witb portable packaging formats, there's a pretty clear trend in the wider Linux world away from relying on old-school package management 'raw' in favor of immutable operating system images. There are Ubuntu derivatives in this space, but the clear leaders are NixOS on the radical side and Fedora Silverblue for the more conservative approach that reinforces/enhances traditional package management tools with OSTree to gain some of the same benefits.

It may be that Canonical's advantage in the server space and among developers is 'sticky', now that Ubuntu is established in those markets, and that it's less ripe for the same kind of play that Ubuntu made by building mindshare first on the desktop. They may also catch up in some of these areas.

But for all of the reasons I outlined above, I don't think Canonical is in nearly as strong a position to retain its relevance as GitHub was, especially in the long term, in the face of one more thing that makes it less attractive to new desktop users for whom much of the appeal of running Linux in the first place is escape from Microsoft.