Funny, I had to use Ubuntu 22.04 at my previous backend job and hated every minute of it thanks to snap, gnome, apt, wayland, hibernate, touchpad, and other issues that made me pull my hair out and loose several work hours in tinkering just to attempt to fix them so I can be productive at work. Maybe I was also horribly unlucky, who knows, but IMHO Ubuntu has went from the go-to to being the worst possible Linux distro. I was daily driving Ubuntu 10.XX in college and it wasn't this bad.
I get Canonical wants Ubuntu as the competitor for Windows, and they can can cry "wagh! Microsoft monopoly! wagh!" as much as they want, but Ubuntu aint it chief. Linux Mint and others could do it better if they had Canonical's pockets.
Similar for Firefox. Basic stuff that's standard in Chrome and Edge, like translation (I live in an EU country who's language I don't fully master) or spell-check, need to be downloaded as extensions/plugins in Firefox, and separate for each language, and the end quality of the Firefox spellcheck still sucks majorly compared to what Chrome has out of the box.
I get it, we should support Ubuntu and Firefox because freedom and all that, but I can't when the quality of the products and consumer experience is abysmal compared to the paid competition.
> I get it, we should support (...) because freedom and all that, but I can't when the quality (...) is abysmal compared to the paid competition.
Why not? Supporting open alternatives does not mean you exclusively need to use them.
Second, You really don't get it, do you? They will not spend money on anything that might actually threaten Google's dominance. They get 30M to play with AI is because they don't get to spend anything on making Firefox a strong alternative for Chrome. If they did, Google will take all their money away and then it's game over for them.
Google does not pay Apple for "access to the user base". Google pays Apple so that Apple does not try to get into the search engine space and compete with Google.
They also pay Mozilla as a way to keep controlled opposition and a (relatively) inexpensive way of avoid threats of lawsuits like the one that MS had in the past. But they don't need to. If Mozilla for any reason decided to stop conforming to this game and went on to actually fight against Google, Google would drop them in a heartbeat. And who would Mozilla go for, Bing? DDG?
> If they did, Google will take all their money away and then it's game over for them.
Because of the position they put themselves in. Also you underestimate how much cash they have.
Plenty of people have to use Windows at work, it doesn't mean that MacOS (or Ubuntu) is a failure, or that they lack focus, or that this would change if alternatives just went to implement what you need.
The truth is that Google has built a formidable moat around their browser, and even if Mozilla put it as their one mission to catch up, they wouldn't be able to. Also, the first second that Firefox became a credible threat to Google would be the time that Google would drop all the money that they put into Mozilla.