Emphasis on it was. It started to go downhill with Amazon integration and now we have paid security updates. They are holding back developed and available security packages for their OS!
There is no way to still recommend Ubuntu. No need to even talk about the other questionable decisions like snap.
The problem is always having the bad option being enabled by default. Not even the ads are the biggest problem. I didn’t even mention their current ads in the terminal. The problem is the same Microsoft is having now, that your keyboard input gets sent to an untrustworthy third party.
Your comment got cut off. If you wanted to dispute the paid paid claim. It is about Ubuntu Pro, that’s literally all what the basic tier is. We recently even had the case where a patch with a highish CVE rating was only available to subscribers of the service. We also verified that the same patch was already available on Debian. Even without my anecdote it should be obvious why it is bad.