Some ads - fine. Selected and appropriate ads - fine.
Let me explain via my experience of THIS website on an iPhone.
A banner ad appears at the very top, covering most of the cookie notice. I would be surprised if this doesn’t violate EU law.
Upon collapsing it and agreeing to give my soul to the Cookie Monster, another ad takes up most of the screen. This ad, ON A SOFTWARE SITE, says “download now! Start downloading. Download your copy now [green arrow]”, with a small logo at the bottom left saying “learning lab”. ON A SOFTWARE SITE.
I scroll down half a page. Another banner ad appears.
Then I see a tiny amount of information in an infographic followed by a form to donate in US $ or EU $ (not € - they’re asking for euros in $…).
Below that, another Download Now ad, this time from The Books Master. It takes up half the screen.
Then a bit more content. Some testimonials too. Then… another half screen ad. Then the page footer and another half screen ad.
From my estimation, 50% of the page is ads, two of which are deliberately misleading (on behalf of the advertiser).
I have absolutely nothing against ads, but this takes the biscuit. I would absolutely not be surprised if this was done in prep for posting to hacker news, knowing the views it’s going to get - but Id also not be surprised if it’s just designed by someone who doesn’t understand the dreadful public image that this has.
I’ve never heard of the distro. It doesn’t look like it’s designed for the likes of me anyway (clue’s in my username). But I could never direct someone to a site like this.
Not illogical at all. It gives you information about the creators and is atypical for open source folks to commercialize in user-hostile ways. It's like a moral version of code smell.
So how are they supposed to commercialize given that most Linux users are generally a bunch of cheapskates?
Donations seldom amount to enough to pay for hosting costs and supporting the developers and their families.
Nobody buys physical discs anymore.
Selling swag can have some limited success if you can come up with a really cool design, mascot, and/or logo
A few companies have had success selling hardware, but that's a pretty small market overall with quite a bit of competition already.
Subscriptions generally only work if you're providing commercial support contracts.
Valve and JetBrains are the only companies I can think of that are making any significant amount of money selling closed source software to Linux users.
I'm not surprised at all that they are using ads to monetize their distro, as it's one of the few ways they can.
> Valve and JetBrains are the only companies I can think of that are making any significant amount of money selling closed source software to Linux users.
Honestly, JetBrains have some of the better IDEs out there, that have all of the features I need, pretty good code completion and suggestions, some of the best refactoring out there, good debugging capabilities and framework integrations as well as language specific functionality (e.g. dependency management integration). Well worth the money. Even Fleet, their text editor alternative to VSC will probably be mature enough to be a serious contender in a few years, though not yet.
Another piece of software that I pay for is GitKraken, a really nice Git client with a GUI, which makes switching between different accounts a breeze (for example, different GitHub accounts, each with a separate SSH key) and makes using Git actually pleasant with all of the visual features. It feels like a more polished SourceTree or a more featureful Git Cola and makes me feel like you don't need to use the CLI all the time anymore.
On Windows, there's maybe MobaXTerm, perhaps one of the best SSH clients with things like multi-exec, support for a variety of protocols and other quality of life features that mRemoteNG and other options don't quite have. Pretty good.
> So how are they supposed to commercialize given that most Linux users are generally a bunch of cheapskates?
Other than that, most of the software I use is free and good enough (the cheapskate argument, I guess): everything from LibreOffice, to things like GIMP, OBS, Audacity and Kdenlive. I guess what I'm saying is that if you make a really good product that doesn't have alternatives that are close enough in your niche, then you can indeed do decently selling it.
As for how that would look for a distro, I'm not sure, given how many other mature ones are out there. Maybe selling support, though obviously that is hard to do.
There are so many ads and they sometimes blend with the content that it's hard to find information. That was my experience. YMMV