How Canonical is Killing Ubuntu’s Soul
Canonical made $292M in 2024 while forcing snaps, running terminal ads, and ignoring crypto malware in their store. Ubuntu’s trust problem…
Canonical made $292M in 2024 while forcing snaps, running terminal ads, and ignoring crypto malware in their store. Ubuntu’s trust problem is getting worse
Twelve seconds. That’s how long.
That’s how long Firefox takes to cold-start as a Snap package on Ubuntu. The native .deb version? Two seconds. Six times slower, and you didn’t choose this. Canonical chose it for you.
I’ve watched companies destroy community trust before. Mozilla did it with advertising experiments. IBM did it with Red Hat’s licensing changes. The pattern is always the same: a company built on community goodwill starts extracting from that community instead of contributing to it. Canonical is running the same playbook, and if you’re still on Ubuntu, you need to understand what’s happening.
The Bait-and-Switch That Started It All
Run sudo apt install chromium-browser on Ubuntu 24.04. Go ahead. You'd expect a .deb package. What you actually get is snapd installing silently, followed by the Snap version of Chromium from Canonical's proprietary store.
No warning. No prompt. No consent.
