I only know the ones they will willfully ignore for eternity

And why would Microsoft fix those when their paying customers even work for free?

No big software project can ever be fully free of bugs. Apparently it's not all jank all the time.

I really don’t understand why they don’t use the Skype branding for the consumer version. They forgot how many billions they paid for that?

That happened in a past quarter. Money spent in past quarters doesn't matter. The next fiscal quarter is what matters.

Don’t use Fedora or it’s ilk for starters.

Fedora doesn't make Red Hat any money anyway. That's like saying to not use Debian because that could help Canonical's Snap vehicle Ubuntu. For now Fedora is mostly unaffected by Red Hat's weird moves. As a long time openSUSE user myself, I'm somewhat experienced in using a community distribution sponsored by a company that got worse and worse over the years and I definitively would not want to buy SUSE Linux Enterprise ever. Weirdly enough, openSUSE even got better as a consequence of some of SUSE's moves. Fewer employed upstream contributors led to the very automated QA and release processes of Tumbleweed, the rolling release distribution. If you have read about problems within openSUSE because of SUSE, it's about Leap, the LTS variant practically nobody uses because TW is just so stable and good. If Red Hat or SUSE ever go totally mad and torpedoed Fedora / openSUSE, both projects have enough safeguards in place to move the projects into independence with little interruption.

My question above was specifically about Debian, since I’ve heard the point of it being community based used negatively in other places/threads too.

Fun fact: For a few years HP was very invested in Debian because they saw that as the most likely successor to their old HP-UX Unix on mainframe servers.

All these corporations looking to kill off their own relevance. They all in the same death cult or something?

IBM uses mostly Windows in house, so they are not interested in desktop Linux and apparently then nobody else would be either.

pop_OS is a de-crapified Ubuntu remix. It's not a stand-alone distribution. For most packages pop_OS is reliant on Canonical, including graphics drivers. So if you want to use it for gaming and have and AMD or Intel GPU and not an NVidia one, you'll have to stick to Ubuntu's outdated Mesa and kernel drivers. For gaming on AMD/Intel GPUs, something along the lines of EndeavourOS or Fedora should be a better choice. If you use a GeForce, pop_OS should be OK.

"contributor license agreement" is such a broad term, a CLA is not bad in all cases. There are plenty of CLAs that are not about one-way proprietarization of software. Examples of OK CLAs are "You agree that you actually have the right to contribute code" or "If you don't specifically attach add a license header, the MIT license is being used".

Obviously companies like Canonical use the term CLA to make their practices look less shady that it actually is.

Despite their recent crappy moves, Red Hat ist still the largest FOSS contributor.

Signal can block voice messages? How?

I get "SyntaxError: JSON.parse: unexpected character at line 1 column 1 of the JSON data"