Re: Does this mean the distro is no longer condescending ?
They're still zealots.
I have a number of servers at this location. Some are Windows, running WinServer 2008 R2 and WInServer 2012 and 2012 R2. Some are various Linux distros. One is an old Apple XServe which Tim Cook's minions will pry loose from my cold, dead, fingers, and only after I lay waste to Cupertino and sow the ruins with radiocobalt. I also have a few desktop systems, Windows 7, Windows 10, a few XP, a lot of Macs running 10.6 and 10.9 and a few running 10.13. No Linux desktops. Why? Hardware and software incompatibilities. Linux does not talk to many of the various scanners, printers, imagesetters, and so on around here, or at least doesn't talk easily, and if it does, lacks the featureset of those devices when talking to Windows or Mac. I'm in the middle of dumping all the XP and some of the 7 and 10 systems and replacing them with Macs... because it's simply easier to get Macs to talk to the other hardware, and where I _must_ use Windows-based systems, in many cases it's simpler to get a Mac-based VM and still a Windows license on that. Macs and Windows boxes don't argue with me about video cards, network cards, printers, and imagesetters, scanners, floor-standing multifunction devices etc. (We have several Canon floor-standing copier things. One of them supports Linux... in theory. In reality, getting adequate hardcopy out of it from a Linux system is painful. Scans ain't happening, though they should, in theory. The other units simply aren't supported. All work perfectly with Windows and Macs, even ancient versions such as XP and 10.6, even though Mac OS X 10.7 is, officially, the lowest supported version of Mac OS. Yes, I can use it on theoretically unsupported Macs, but Linux systems balk. Perhaps someone who actually gives a damn might be able to coax good behavior out of the Canons and Linux; I just point a Mac or a Windows machine at the print or scan or fax job and It Just Works(tm). I've never got the Canon to send or receive a fax using Linux; we fax things on a semi-regular basis using Windows and Macs, without problems, and so simply and trivially that we no longer have stand-alone fax machines, we fax over the network from desktops. Can't do it from Linux, or at least not from any version of Linux we have using any of out Canon copier things.)
We have reason to use certain software which is simply not available on Linux, including MS Office and image-editing software like Photoshop and Affinity Photo. No, Open/Libre Office will NOT replace MS Office; I mostly use Word, and could probably make do with LibreOffice instead, but there are those who use Excel (a lot!) and simply cannot make do with LibreOffice. We have tried. No, it won't work. Not here. Pretty much everyone uses Outlook, even though most hate it. Tests with other email/calendaring systems show that the users here hate pretty much everything else (yes, especially Lotus Notes) more than they hate Outlook. It takes talent to be hated more than Outlook; the competition has lots of talent. No, the GIMP is not an adequate replacement for Photoshop or Photo. In particular, given that Linux systems have problems talking to the scanners we have here, the GIMP is crippled out of the box 'cause it can't scan. It can't even bloody scan from some of our directly-attached large-format high-resolution scanners, though it can detect the el cheapos. Problem is, we don't want scans from the el cheapos for production work; el cheapo scans are fine for me and the beancounters and admin, but the art department would have collective cows at the thought, and that tends to leave a mess which I would be stuck with cleaning up, so no thanks. I usually scan either from the el cheapo no-name scanner in the department or from the Canon floor-stander over the way, because 150x150, 300x300 or at most 600x600 scans are plenty for me and the el cheapo or the Canon can manage that without problems... except that the Canon won't scan to Linux. Then there's output. Assuming that we get scans in, somehow, despite the good scanners not supporting Linux, output is a bitch 'cause the good printers, including the imagesetters, don't support Linux.
This doesn't matter for servers; I rarely need to scan or print from a server and if I do, or if I need to fax, it's easy to print to a PDF on one of the shared volumes and then print or fax the PDF using a machine which can print or fax, or to have another machine do the scan and save it as a PDF or whatever on a shared volume and access it that way. The lack of support for some hardware and software isn't a problem, with a server. It's a big problem with desktop systems.
I expect lots of screaming from zealots.