There used to be a lot more public open source companies but a lot of them were bought out. Sun Microsystems, Novell, Silicon Graphics, RedHat, Caldera, Oracle, etc. all are or were companies that made open source software and were publicly traded.

This could lead to an early demise of Linux Mint. It's great we have LMDE ready

1. Take Debian
2. Make it worse
3. ???
4. IPO

It would be nice if the most of the money went into things that would help the linux ecosystem (I know canonical contributes to debian, sometimes makes usability improvements, and isn't all negative). But it'll probably just go into AI bullshit.

Well, Mint could just fall back to LMDE if Ubuntu starts going in the same direction as RHEL and starts account-walling their source code and blocking redistribution under the penalty of an account ban, but I don't know about other Ubuntu clones.

Probably very little, its like how rehl being a commercial product doesn't mean fedora isn't open source. In the absolute worst case scenario distros can switch their base to Debian unstable.

Affect other distros?

Hopefully, they'll all get something better then cloud-init.

Canonical pumps out dumb stuff.

Ubuntu was a critical part of the Linux ecosystem for many years. It is probably the first distro of many of us (myself included).

But last ~10 years have not been kind to Canonical. They are losing ground everywhere, and they are no longer the engine of Linux adoption that they used to be. Others have taken over.

It won't. Well. Perhaps some distros might see new users/customers when everyone's abandoning Ubuntu.

Snap is like the IE of the Linux world but worse (IE at least installs <INSERT_BROWSER_HERE>). Nothing is lost.

Oh no! Anyway …

More money into Linux? Probably a good thing in the grand scheme of things. I'd avoid Ubuntu though.

Probably won't hit Arch too hard.

It's not as if Canonical hasn't already enshittified. I don't think going public is going to change that much.

I’m out of the loop, canonical is IPOing?

For a company whose main product is developing and supporting linux the ipo is the first step to being bought.

What does this mean? The same thing that it meant for other linux companies, except the brand is not worth preserving because it’s toxic.

What effect will this have on other distros? See red hat.