Comment by techntoke
7 years ago
Yes it really is. There are some people internally that use Fedora, but even they are becoming more rare. Canonical on the otherhand requires their employees use their distro.
I personally run Arch and haven't had issues on any hardware that I've tested, and it has the benefit of staying current with the latest stable kernel and software, so it doesn't have to backport fixes and features.
My understanding (via the Ubuntu podcast) is that Canonical allows people (outside of core desktop team) to use at least non-Ubuntu distros.
This could be a more recent change, but while I was working there in 2015 it was part of the hiring process to use your own laptop with Ubuntu, and that is how they would test compatibility with multiple devices. Heck, if I could run Arch Linux, I'd consider going back.
This is all third hand information on my part, but I would guess that Canonical's shift towards server and away from desktop could be related.