Very similar roots, also RPM-based, but with a different take on things, such as using Btrfs and KDE by default, which I prefer.
BTW: KDE is not the default, it's just the first in the list :)
I see, so we're angry about things that haven't happened yet. TIL the OSS community has precogs and this is Minority Report!
Look, I get that two whole packages out of literally tens of thousands did this (I've seen lxd and chromium mentioned). But why don't we convict Canonical after they commit their crimes, eh?
How are there greater sunk costs related to switching distros later instead of now if Ubuntu starts actually misbehaving in a significant way?
I grant you, if you haven't picked a distro yet and this whole thing bothers you, by all means, pick something else! That's the beauty of the Linux world!
But if you're already in the ecosystem (and I have to assume most people complaining are... Otherwise why waste energy complaining about the actions of a company that doesn't affect you) I don't see how the sunk costs fallacy applies here.
So yes, there could be huge sunk costs. After fighting with this work laptop for a full work day to get every single step of the onboarding completed, I am not looking forward to doing it again -- even less so if the proprietary and mandatory programs that I have to install can't be guaranteed to work on anything outside Ubuntu.
The Enterprise Linux ecosystem is a solid alternative to Ubuntu. Fedora for desktop and either CentOS or Fedora for servers, depending on how stable they need to be and how much maintenance you're willing to do.