If we nees to support a corporation with our money, it is in SUSE that we must place our hope.

SUSE fired almost all upstream contributors a decade or so ago. They used to employ 10-20 KDE developers, about the same number of GNOME developers, a bunch of OpenOffice developers (their Go-OO variant of OpenOffice served as base for LibreOffice), and maintained Mono. As much as I personally like openSUSE TW (IMO it’s the best rolling release distribution), SUSE as a corporate entity is worse than Red Hat under IBM. If you think Red Hat under IBM is bad, look up what SUSE having been a Novell subsidiary and then getting sold two additional times did to them. Red Hat would need cancel upstream contributions for so much more to come down to the level of SUSE. A company looking for enterprise Linux support is still best served with Red Hat. Pretty much the entire competition was freeloading off Red Hat’s work. After shutting down their entire desktop department, SUSE was left with a few packagers and two or so people who developed GNOME extensions.

As I wrote in another comment: The company most interested in helping out upstream projects with desktop focus is Valve, not only via their own developers but also by contracting Collabora and Blue Systems. Given how Valve’s update cycle of SteamOS is, those contributions will mostly still land first in “regular” Linux distributions such as openSUSE TW or Fedora, though. It’s a lucky coincidence that Valve developed and released Steam Deck but they are also mostly just interested in the plumbing and Plasma Desktop itself, not applications (unless it’s about apps SteamOS developers use and they need to scratch their own itches though bug fixes). So Bluetooth an power management: sure. Music players: no.

Can you explain why “community system” is bad? Genuinely curious, since the word community sounds like it’s not controlled by corpo interests

Canonical seem allergic against helping out upstream projects. They rather make their own software, licensed in a specific way that they have exclusive rights to sell proprietary versions. Usually those in-house projects fail and Canonical starts freeloading Red Hat-developed software. That’s why they moved from Unity to Gnome. It’s just easier and cheaper to port bug fixes from the competitor’s product. Canonical was actually caught filing bug reports at Red Hat: https://airlied.livejournal.com/72817.html (they tested if a bug also affected Fedora, then they asked Red Hat to fix the bug upstream. I guess they use fake names now but otherwise continue the practice)

They’re giving Ubuntu pro ads in the package manager, forcing you to use snap to install Firefox (by installing the snap when you use apt), and probably other stuff