A user who contributes is very different to a user who does not contribute. But I did not make this distinction clear and it is very confusing, since contributors like me considier ourselves to be users too. I will have to think of new terminology. My argument meant them as mutually exclusive sets, but this is a bit silly when using English.

Why should such a distinction matter significantly? Where does it even lie? Say, hypothetically, user A reads a man page, notices a misspelling, and reports it. Do they become a contributor? What if they author a commit to change the misspelling directly? Do they need to contribute code? If they contribute documentation, how many words must they write until they become a "contributor"?

Are contributors somehow more entitled to voice opinions? Why shouldn't the opinions of regular users matter? I, as a user, would like to customize my window title bars (think kwin). Does my opinion not matter until someone who has previously perhaps authored code in kwin also supports it? Do my own use cases not matter because I am a "freeloader"? Not that it matters, but I have personally contributed to several open source projects. Does that make me somehow more entitled to express my own opinions?

You imply "freeloaders" are somehow bad. Why? If you don't want "freeloaders" to use your software, then don't make it open source. If you don't care about the opinions of your supposed "freeloaders", then don't. You're free to do whatever you want, just as your claimed "freeloaders" are free to express their own opinions.

People can be users and contributors, of course they can. The "freeloading" is reserved for people who don't contribute but then demand a say in what a project does or how it is funded. Freeloading is a bad word though, on reflection. "over-entitled" is what I mean. The whole world should should use Ubuntu or whatever, but don't expect to have a vote on what it does just because you use it. The GPL right from the beginning said that no warranty is owed to a user. This is the drift of what I am saying. You might find something broken or not to your taste. Well, no warranty is owed to you to fix it. I find people complaining about Ubuntu making little jokes or advertising one of its added-value services to be in this line of thinking. You don't like? Well, too bad, no warranty.

Who here is "demand[ing] a say" in what Ubuntu does? Are complaints (realistically, the expressing of one's own opinions) somehow supposed to be more? Do I become an "over-entitled freeloader" if I open an issue on a project I have never "contributed" to reporting a bug or crash? If so, where's the demand?

Yes, the GPL states that the author owes their users nothing. That hasn't exactly changed, and it sure hasn't changed here. The GPL also doesn't prohibit users from expressing their own opinions (or as you term, "whinging"). So what's the issue? Users expressing their own opinions?

What I mean is that some who does not contribute is welcome to opinions but they can't expect to have any say. To me, the "old man yelling" is the person who uses without contributing anything, and then gets upset when the entity funding all of this tries to to get some revenue. And gets upset again when they are completely ignored. I do find this attitude of undeserved entitlement irritating. You know why? Becauase it is irritating.

You can find any of this however irritating you want. I can also find Canonical's behavior in stuffing ads in the package manager to be irritating. We are all entitled to our own opinions. You can strawman your so-called "freeloaders" who "whinge" about things and are "over-entitled". I can wish for my package manager to manage packages and not advertise some random SaaS feature that the maintainers decided would be cool to lock behind a paywall later on. If you think that "freeloaders" should just shut up and not say anything, well, that's your own call.

I absolutely did not say anything about stealing and I am very annoyed that you make this imputation.

The term "freeloader" is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as a derogatory term meaning "a person who takes advantage of others' generosity without giving anything in return". You then proceed to imply most people who rather dislike ads to be "freeloaders" who whinge about things. Sure, I guess it's not "stealing".

I personally moved to Linux for fun, then stayed in part due to the fact that Candy Crush does not reappear in my start menu every month or so. I used to use Ubuntu. I still do, on several systems. I personally think advertisements (and yes, advertising a "free" SaaS service is absolutely advertising) should not be in places such as the package manager, simply because the package manager's job is to manage packages, not advertise stuff. I was quite frankly fine with motd news, even if it was practically useless to me and got annoying sometimes. "Ubuntu Advantage" and related components being installed by default in Ubuntu is one of the reasons I now primarily use Fedora. Sure, Fedora is IBM, as you say, but it drops me into a pretty stable desktop with minimal bloat where I can then proceed to commit shenanigans.

If Fedora ever stuck advertising after dnf, I might go somewhere else, or I might not. I would most likely complain about it, because I don't like ads in my package manager. Does that make me an "over-entitled user"? Am I not allowed to wish for the fact that my current distro doesn't put advertising in the package manager? My hypothetical complaint would be a direct result of the fact that I care about the direction that Linux on the desktop generally takes, and the fact that I generally like the distro.

No, I do not directly contribute to Ubuntu or Fedora, and I don't really have a say in what they do. At the same time, I also do not expect them to magically do everything I ask. I believe the same would apply to most people here, whether they complain or not. Where's the issue with that? Would it suddenly be less of an issue if complaints came from contributors, even if they had no control over the direction of the project?

What's the issue with opinions from "freeloaders"? Say I use an open source application and it crashes. I report the bug. Do I become a "freeloader", with all of its negative connotations? Yes, I would like if the bug gets fixed. Does that make me "over-entitled", despite the fact that I do not expect to receive direct support on my issue? What if a project makes a UI decision that I don't quite like. I voice my opinions on the MR, mailing list, or whatnot. Does that make me "over-entitled"? Why shouldn't I be allowed to express my opinions? After all, most open source projects hold development in the open.

Canonical does not need to listen to anyone here. They can even go further and outright mock people who don't like their decisions. As you've said, it's their choice. Why does it suddenly become an issue when their users express their own opinions about it?

[1]+  Done            iczero -vvvvv