cmeerw

at least you could keep their reviews so users could at least know if the app can be trusted.

You mean, don't trust a flatpak uploaded by a random person, but if there are enough fake reviews, it can be trusted?

There is also lowendspirit, but in both cases you have to be very careful what you buy - not everything that is advertised there will work as advertised or will work long-term

where they will double your monthly data limit for free when you comment your order number.

where they use you to spam the forum thread (for giving away something rarely anyone has any use for)

So they actually rewrote The Hurd in Rust.

There is no reason to “hate” Ubuntu but there are better choices.

What are those better choices then (for those who currently use the non-LTS Ubuntu releases and don't want to move to rolling releases or LTS-only releases)?

I still think Ubuntu is the best option (particularly if you want to use the non-LTS releases)

Having said that I do hate snaps and also dislike flatpaks. So what I do is just use the Firefox deb package from the PPA and the chromium package from Linux Mint. Oh, and I have actually replaced ubuntu-advantage-tools with a no-op dummy package.

Only issue is they’re stored in my server as belonging to the server user (I assume everything in those directories should belong to root and I can just use chown?) But I also don’t know if they retain the same permissions when backed up.

Not everything will be owned by root, and some of the binaries will be setuid or setgid, some might even have extended attributes (e.g. ping will usually have a security.capability attribute). /var will also have a lot of different owners.

"they put ads in the terminal" isn't really accurate.

Their "ubuntu-advantage-tools" adds information to one of their other products to the output of apt. You can easily get rid of that by uninstalling/replacing "ubuntu-advantage-tools". It's definitely not like they are selling ad space in your terminal to third parties.