Ubuntu's MOTD displays dynamic ads and at least one of these ads was about Istio. E.g. as best I can tell, every Ubuntu installation that hadn't disabled dynamic MOTDs displayed this Istio ad for most of August: https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-motd/ubuntu-motd/trunk/... .

(Of course as a Linkerd person I think it's ironic to advertise Istio on MicroK8s because Istio is anything but micro. But Microk8s has great Linkerd support these days, so maybe we'll get a Linkerd ad one day, and harmony in the universe will be restored.)