I have to use Ubuntu 18.04 for some things and even with a minimal installation, I found some things phoned home or pushed changes.

I could remove some packages, like ubuntu-report or unattended-upgrades, but some seemed to be intertwined with other packages in a (purposeful?) labyrinth of nested dependencies.

They made themselves critical and uninstalling would break or cripple other fundamental system components.

Some I disabled in the config files, like apport, motd_news and kerneloops. Some I disabled and masked in systemd and others like snapd and whoopsie/whoopsie-preferences, I had to do:

  dpkg -L snapd |
  while read f
  do
    cat /dev/null > "$f"
  done

I wonder how this kind of nonsense percolates through a company?

Is it developers from commercial software vendors changing jobs and solving the problems the same way they solved them for other corporate customers? Or is it marketing carefully plotting a release by release path to dominance? Or is it people who truly believe that having a viable market for linux software will be good?

I mean, there might be some truths - people lag with their updates, people don't defend their privacy, and people would like to pay for software but have no avenue to do so.

But accepting those truths and unilaterally forcing "solutions" might find linux is a different sort of animal.