That is a fundamental difference, the Universe repository is community maintained outside of the Pro service. It always was before Pro too. I don’t think Fedora has a separate repo for community-maintained packages. I still don’t see the issue with offering something above and beyond what you traditionally have and charging a fee for it. They could just have easily never provided official support for Universe.

Would MX Linux with KDE fit your needs?

Wrong. They merely stop supporting it when a new version is released, just like everyone else. You can skip Pro and get the same experience you get with any other distro.

They’re giving you 10 years of updates on those packages for free? I know Alma is from Tux Care but that extended support comes at a price as well. Leap is two years. LMDE support ends soon after the newest version. Fedora gets 13 months after the newest version I believe. Maybe I’m wrong on some of those but none of those come close to the free support canonical provides on LTS or Pro.

Right, but if you’re after the level of “stability” that Canonical is offering, where are you getting it for free? Maybe there is another place but none that I’m aware of. I think it is perfectly fine for them to charge for that, especially if enterprise customers are the target audience and those who aren’t don’t have to pay for it.

They also don’t provide those updates. I am a Fedora guy by the way. I’m not defending Canonical, just pointing out that this is a silly reason to dislike them.

They are security updates that were never available otherwise. They didn’t take something that was freely available and put it behind a paywall. It was a new service.

The updates available through Ubuntu Pro wouldn’t have normally been available prior to Pro. It’s an added service, not something that was previously available that is now locked behind a paywall. There are plenty of reasons to not like Canonical but this isn’t one.