Companies and organizations earn money by selling user data from these intrusive AIs, and ladybird is the complete opposite, so I doubt it, probably the closest thing to that will be allowing users to have their preferred AI linked on the sidebar, which is normal and non-intrusive by itself
Edit: Some companies earn even more money just by keeping investors happy with this AI bubble
Ladybird is a nom profit, and its system consist in limiting sponsor max donation to 100k per year, so no company can sponsor more than that and make ladybird dependent on them. On top of that, they try to balance budget to keep money for 18months of salaries at all times, so they dont feel the need to rush decisions and can have stable development
Stremio uploads/seeds just when you're watching the movie, and usually with a very small cache. On a 20gb movie maybe you seed 200-300mb, which isn't anything substantial
Some will use the built in note editor, some the built in music player, some the built in video player, and now some will use matrix
Mint isn't overly bloated, or even "bloated", these apps are useful for a decent part of the demographic, and having them preinstalled lowers the friction a new user feels when installing a new OS
Gnome isn't bad, at all. The team has caused controversy and made mistakes, but gnome's experience is great.
Talking about ubuntu, snaps suck, and it is more "bloated" than what you'd expect, but still, ubuntu isn't half bad. Is mint better for what the ubuntu audience wants? Yes. Does ubuntu still work well? Yes
Ubuntu 100%, if you count how many distros are ubuntu based (and collaterally debian based), but I believe it is the most used one even if you only count official ubuntu releases
Maybe arch would be quite high, if you count the steamdeck as desktop (maybe), and the big increase on arch users in the past couple of years (wen't from being rare to 1 in 3 users saying "I use arch btw")
Fedora 40 with kde plasma 6 dropped a day or two ago, and they did remove x11, you have to get it from the repo in case you want it, otherwise, it only comes and is planned for wayland, which I believe is great, for once it does seem like the year of wayland
They give a good Image to this kind of developer and enthusiasts group
Also, a possible chance of not having to depend on google, for 100k bucks, thats a really cheap ticket for them