Instead you left people who trusted you dangling, only sporadically feeding them promises you would never fulfill.

Now, you see, this is the part that I as an uninvolved observer who's just now catching up on the happenings do not get. Promises that were never fullfilled?
How long has or hasn't this actually been an issue? Because from what I can see looking at the codeberg commits, it seems like development stalled for how long, like a month or so?

I totally get not wanting to be left hanging and having some answers and pathway for how contributions can happen. But as you also agree on, I also get real life being more important and getting in the way sometimes. And in that sense, being out of it for a month or so does not exactly seem like an earth-shattering amount, even if it's annoying when it happens to be the project lead and not much can happen.

I just can't help but feel like all of this has been pretty impatient and premature, which also makes it hard for me to really understand the point of the fork, even if I can relate to the basic rationale behind it. But then again, I have no knowledge of the direct going ons and communications between the contributors and the events that led to this. So there might be a lot I'm just not getting.

Of the remaining ones I'd say Fedora is probably the safest bet. Not as cutting edge as the other two, but well engineered and stable.
Rolling releases like Tumbleweed and Endeavour can be more interesting and partifularly good for gaming because they always have the newest stuff and patches and performance improvements. Which can also bite you a bit in the back though if you have an Nvidia graphics card. Nvidia doesn't play too well with open source and they don't put a lot of effort into it, so the newest versions of their drivers occasionally break or do stupid stuff. Which isn't a big deal if you have a system that can rollback (tumbleweed can, dunno about endeavour) but might be a bit annoying sometimes

Those all sound like good distributions to me. Although I would probably scratch NixOS off that list if you don't want to start out with something complex. It is an extremely unique distro which does things very differently than most distros. Which isn't a bad thing, but unless that's specifically what you're looking for, I'd probably choose something more traditional as first distro.

The point is the efficiency of the money spent on them for the open source ecosystem

Hence my question about SUSE and Canonical. I have exactly zero context for being able to determine that these expenses are excessive. They very well might, but "this number is bigger than the other one" without any industry context whatsoever just doesn't strike me as a meaningful argument.

That being said, if one's primary goal is to support open source development, the best way to spend one's money is obviously to donate to software projects directly. If one needs server support AND wants to spend money in a way that does most for development, the question still stands whether any direct competitors do any better.

Edit: seems like the post from Celestial kinda settles the matter anyways
https://kbin.social/m/linux/t/107420/Reminder-that-RedHat-makes-A-LOT-of-money-already-The#entry-comment-432567

Well these contributions are now behind a paywall. The salary of the sales people devs are now safe.

They factually are not. Any fixes to RHEL go also go to CentOS Stream. and their contributions to the Kernel, GNOME, etc are freely available to anyone as well.

Also, I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to take away from the whole 66/33 thing. Are SUSE or Canonical handling it notably differently? If they've concluded spending lots on PR will get them lots of costumers, making a shitton of money with 1/3 going to devs still might lead to more contributions than making a little ton of money with most going to devs.

RedHat is probably the biggest Linux contributor across the whole ecosystem (for the kernel alone, only companies like Intel, Google or Huawei are sometimes bigger) and the average Linux Desktop user/hobbyist isn't even their target demographic, so what money to possibly not throw at them are you even talking about? Are you currently paying money for a RedHat subscription?

Also spending money on marketing/ads isn't the same as selling ads.

I'd still rather see RedHat as one of the biggest kernel/linux contributors make that extra money than fucking Oracle, Amazon etc.

Also:

They sell ads first, IT second.

They sell ads? Source?

Due to my lack of strict knowledge, I take it that there is a difference of opinion on whether RedHat violates the GPL in this case

I don't think there is a difference of opinion? RedHat only offering source code to paying customers (and devs) is completely legal and in line with the GPL license. But maybe there's something more to it that I missed.

Hobestly, I can respect that. They seem to be fairly open about the motivations of that decision and who it's targeted it without devolving into vague fluffy corporate speech too much. You can sense the author was a bit pissed by the reactions.
And I do agree that many of the reactions to the news seemed overblown and I think the actions make sense from their point of view without being super shady, even if it still has some negative repercussions for the open source world as well.

It will stop a lot of people from entering random commands they googled up though.

Yeah, it's a bit of a conundrum. Lemmygrad is the most egregious part of it and easy to block thankfully.
But I agree with some of the other posters that lemmy.ml is still pretty bad in terms of what gets allowed and who gets modetated. Luckily, this still is not an unsolvable problem in a federated world. Of course lemmy.ml could also just be blocked, but many instances will probably be reluctant to do that, as it also hosts some of the bigger communities currently. But we can make an effort to prioritize non lemmy.ml communities over their counterpart, a different meme community over [email protected] etc, and if consensus is strong enough and enough communities shift, lemmy.ml could theoretically find itself in a position where it will have to clean up their moderation practices or risk wider defederation.