I am also a big fan of Ubuntu Server and Mark Shuttleworth. The guy does not get the proper credit. He's basically running a charity for hackers and startups yet, for some reason, is not very popular on HN.
He's a risk taker with Unity/Ubuntu Phone/other things that didn't pan out, and people treat it like Google abandoning their products. Canonical has money, but not Google money.
People also get overly bent out of shape for having Amazon search integration with the desktop at one point, which I did not like, but it had a clear, functional way to disable that function.
Their revenue of ~$126M in 2017 is very modest compared with its rivals Red Hat (~$3B) or Microsoft (~$90B). My biggest fear is that one of them may take over Canonical and shut down Ubuntu.
