And regarding the technologies they use, they always choose to develop their own (often failing) solution instead of using/improving a well established and popular one. Unity desktop, snap packages, Mir… the list probably goes on. To me, Canonical is kinda like Apple of the Linux world.
This old canard again. It drives me mad every time I see it.
snap
Came first. Flatpak was Red Hat’s “not invented here” rival. Flatpak turned out to be more popular. That’s a) not evidence that Canonical did a NIH, and b) evidence that sometimes doing a NIH pays off.
Unity
For some reason the people who love to hate on Ubuntu for doing Unity never seem to have quite the same disdain for Linux Mint for doing Cinnamon, Pop_OS! for doing COSMIC, Solus for soing Budgie, etc.
Mir
I’ll give you this one. But Mir has since grown into a very capable multi-protocol Wayland+ compositor and is a fine piece of kit, if rather niche.
Upstart
Alright you didn’t actually list this one, but damn it these straw men aren’t going to fight themselves! People often mention upstart in the same list, despite the fact that it was released before systemd, became briefly widely adopted across Linux land, and then when systemd came to maturity Ubuntu dropped upstart almost as quickly as everybody else, showing that the NIH instinct really isn’t all that strong.
Most of these are just a list of things that a big company tried to see if any of it sticks; that’s the very grist to the mill that FOSS thrives on.
It also ignores all the stuff that Canonical either originated or early-adopted which has survived, like LXD, OpenStack, or cloud-init.