It’s considered poor security practice to have compilers or interpreters installed on machines where they’re not needed. Someone who isn’t a developer and is only installing packages via apt (or snap, yuck) doesn’t need gcc.

"security" practices, only get in the way of the good guys.

Haha, I assume you are joking. Because they are intended to get in the way of the bad guys, to be sure at the cost of some inconvenience to the good guys.

Many ubuntu-*desktop* users don't need compiler, and since they were intended target audience ubuntu doesn't include it, after all if you need the compiler is it that painful to run `apt install -y build-essential`?

I had been using linux for for almost 10 years by the time Ubuntu came out, starting with SLS and then moving to Slackware. The concept of not having a compiler was foreign to me as it was required to build the kernel so your system would have necessary device drivers and features.

> ... after all if you need the compiler is it that painful to run `apt install -y build-essential`?

No, of course not. But that's when it became obvious to me that I was not the target audience for that distribution, and had switched to Gentoo shortly after.