Smolts.org

The key difference here is _certification_. As in money is paid to have Canonical certify that a system or component works with Ubuntu and to potentially make the necessary technical changes to have the equipment work. Certification is a value-added service that vendors provide to equipment and system manufacturers.

Ratings at Smolts.org are crowdsourced from individual hardware owners and not a certification service. Such ratings are a best effort to codify what currently works and what doesn't by helping users share information about their experience with the hardware. But there's no vendor service associated with it that equipment manufacturers can pay for in an attempt to ensure their equipment does in fact work.

-jef