Also they have been collaborating with the US and Israel to kill people on wars for some time

Red Hat has been all over AI for a while

Hosting LLMs is different from pushing AI crap down end users' throats Copilot style.

I think there'll always be an issue depending on how dependent a project is on a company. Because the main risk isn't that some bumbleling idiot of a CEO will run the projects and his company to the ground, but that sensible people will take decisions that serve their own interests, but not the interests of users.

Free software creates a framework wherein companies may have an interest in the success of a project and contribute to it. This is a good thing, insofar that to companies, the project is just a tool that needs to work well and to the programmers, the company is just one of several contributors.

In a community driven project, those who take decisions are the programmers who directly contribute to it and who are also usually users. Their interests are closer to those of all other end users. They want the project to work, and that may also be what financial contributors want.

However, if the software is a product of the company, they'll intend to extract value from it directly. The interest of shareholders will supercede those of programmers and end users. That is why they may take decisions that are bad from a user's perspective, not because their dumb, but because they have other interests in mind.
Inserting adds is a good way to get fundings from add companies at the detriment of users.
Adding suscription tiers is a good way to extract wealth from part of the users. Adding AI is a good way to secure loans from banks that speculate on the AI bubble, and maybe even from companies like Nvidia, interested in making the bubble last and grow.

It's not a matter of being sensible or not, it's a matter of whose interest you're sensibly serving.

I’ll stop looking for alternatives when it becomes a one click AI on button instead.

Kudos to its little brother, Ironfox.

He's remembering things from Ubuntu 12.10, yeah 14 years ago :)

I was remembering my Ubuntu Unity days which apparently ended in 2012 or so. Didn't realise it was so long ago.

Ubuntu might've had ads in the OS even before Microslop. Who knows, maybe they even gave them the idea.

The only ads I notice is that apt shows how many packages can be updated through an optional paid Expanded Security Maintenance. This isn’t very obtrusive but I’m on a 4 year old LTS release currently so things might have changed.

Receiving updates for anything in Universe requires Ubuntu Pro which is free for home users but still requires signing up to give you access to that update repository and once you sign up, they can match your account with what you install/update, so there is server-side tracking. In theory there is the possibility of community-maintained updates there but that required adhering to Canonical's draconian version freeze rules. Something Fedora and its derivates do not have to that degree (during a release cycle any update is fine if it doesn't break compatibility).

it's pretty legendary