> Microsoft will buy Canonical before the decade is out is my thought.

People have said this for a decade and it still hasn't happened... IMO it won't either. It's privately owned and even if they do go public it's doubtful they'll give away so many shares that they can be taken over... It's Mark Shuttleworth's baby and he doesn't seem to want to sell it.

I think this is very likely. They bought Lennart, and Github, afterall.

If they'd wanted a Linux distribution, they'd have bid on Red Hat back when it was up for sale, which was at least fairly profitable and fit in with their enterprise lineup.

Yup. Seems like they consistently invent their own thing that's different than what RH/Suse/etc... come up with, then give up and just use that thing (Upstart vs. Systemd, Mir vs. Wayland, Unity vs. Gnome Shell and now Snap will probably lose to Flatpak...).

They're trying to answer or get ahead of Red Hat but failing every time. Systemd beat Upstart, RH-captured Gnome beat Unity (and helped ensure Systemd was the easiest way to go for a general-purpose desktop distro, in the process), Wayland beat Mir, and Flatpack may not win but Snap sure as hell isn't gonna.

I don't understand your comment, but would like to make the observation that Canonical vis-a-vis Ubuntu is trying to make Ubuntu as ubiquitous as Windows when it comes to someones 'first' Linux system, or as a Linux system that "Just works" and are abusing this position (in my opinion) to push forward proprietary and regressive technologies like Snap. Open source does not negate something being proprietary. There are many 'one format' packages out there, flatpak and appimage being two great ones. Snap is two steps back, no steps forward, but it has that Ubuntu logo which conveys authority, and that's about as un-Linux like as it gets.

By virtue of power-of-authority, they're quite literally forcing this garbage on the greater linux ecosystem that other people simply don't even know exists. Ask anybody on the street if they know what a Linux is and if the answer isn't 'no', the ones who can respond will say something like 'oh yeah, i have ubuntu on my thumb drive'.

If you'd have told me this would happen in 1995, I'd have said you're nuts and gone back to hammering dents out of my Yggdrasil install as I chuckled.