also this insane hiring process

Ubuntu was my gateway into Linux, but man I'm glad I ditched it years ago.

Canonical was good, then the Amazon Affiliate link in the Sidebar happened, after that it only went down hill.

When have any of you given them your private information?

I thnok context is required here. Canonical foes not only make Ubuntu, it makes other things. Maybe they ask for information only for their cloud subscription or something?

Same 💪🏻 (Mint pleb)

What does highschool maths have to do with anything? I assume they alsoo require higher education? Who keeps their highschool grades around for job interviews? This is absolutely bonkers!

They were trying to be too general purpose but never had good enough enterprise support to make people consider moving from redhat so they tried to get profit from desktop users

Feel like more context would be required tbh. Like if you are contacting support by email you are giving them your email address and they kinda need it to reply to you.

Ubuntu Pro requires users (both individuals and enterprises) to register with Canonical to receive security updates.

I hate the fact that i like their font so much. After i found out the license was pulled into question and my distro wasn't packaging it, i switched to something else, but so far nothing really hits the same way for me as a GUI font.

First law of privacy policies: if someone feels compelled to start out by ensuring that your privacy is important to them, it's not.

If it actually is, their policies will demonstrate that clearly and unambiguously, and they won't have to be so defensive about it.

Secondary is my highest level of education. The equivalent would be high school plus a trade. Now I'm a sysadmin at the very same university that I dropped out of, and regularly meet the calculus teacher that failed me.

Also consider that Canonical is a British company, and secondary education is often enough in Europe to become a well-functioning adult. Depending on the job, high school education can be more relevant than the specialized knowledge gained from higher education.

Ah, yes, green Ubuntu. Nice.

They also make green Debian!

Same. But is someone going to sue me if I install it on whatever unafiliated distro I use? It's going to be just fine as long as I don't distribute it, especially since I'm more interested in it as a terminal font than as a GUI font.

Nah. Nope. That's not what this says.

Your Lemmy server keeps your email for logins. Requires less language.

Absolutely necessary to know how I, at unspecified age, performed in high school, perhaps as long as 3/4 of my lifetime ago.

You get security updates without Ubuntu pro.

I skip anyone that requests it, it‘s not a good sign to me. It‘s them screening undesirables.

Well the reason i care is because i use a distro that is exclusively libre (Guix). I do have to use a separate channel to get the regular kernel cause i simply can't go without it, but i figured i may as well use libre-only as much as possible, especially for something as easily replaceable as a font. I can still get the font by other means but chose to use something else. I'm currently using Lato, which is fine and i'm getting used to it now, but i probably still prefer the look of Ubuntu. In the terminal i use Mononoki, have been using it for years now and haven't even felt the need to try anything else, i still love how it looks.

Extended updates past the normal eol

I've heard some horror stories about canonical interviews, namely that Mark Shuttelworth sits in on all the interviews, and dismisses applicants based on vibes

https://canonical.com/legal/font-licence

"This licence allows the licensed fonts to be used, studied, modified and redistributed freely."

It's not one of the normal licenses, and idk a lawyer. Why can't a distro include it?

"We don't sell your data except to provide you with services or products" should be illegal wording. Those two words include 100% of what any company does lol

"We don't sell your data only if you don't use us at all"

You know when someone says "your X is extremely important to us" it's always the opposite.

The turning point for me was when they started making a Windows-style start menu with web search enabled by default.

No, it is important to them because it makes them money.

Canonical has an incredibly convoluted, daunting hiring process. What's seen in the screenshot can't even realistically be considered the tip of the iceberg.
Besides fussing over your high school performance (if you don't claim to be top X% of your class it's an instant rejection), they also make you do written quizzes and some "psychometric assessment" (pseudo-science BS). After that it'll be roughly TEN rounds of interviews, the final one being with Mark Shuttleworth himself who may very well be a dick and decide he simply doesn't like you.

If you're curious, someone has written down their full experience here:
https://www.dustri.org/b/my-experience-with-canonicals-interview-process.html

I once considered applying to them since they have a lot of interesting job postings on LinkedIn, but after reading through these experiences I decided this simply wasn't worth it.

Makes sense. You’re asking them to make things more secure, which requires logs to know what’s going on. Additionally you’re paying for a security service instead of upgrading to another version to get free updates.

We don’t sell your data except when we sell your data.

i wouldn't use ubuntu because they default to gnome. that's enough of a red flag.

linux is as much about aesthetics as freedom.

The “regular kernel” is not libre?

Thank you for helping me form an opinion about Canonical.

Does gnome has anything privacy related that i should look into or is it only about the astetics? (I want to go back to gnome) (Also in a linux noob)

How is this a meme?

That was a really interesting rabbit hole. Thank you.

After that it’ll be roughly TEN rounds of interviews, the final one being with Mark Shuttleworth himself who may very well be a dick and decide he simply doesn’t like you.

A dear friend of mine went through this hiring process for a very senior spot. She's been out of high-school for 35 years, has obtained 2 degrees since, and has run a hemisphere for a very nerdy storage-adjacent pro-serve company for a decade; but still needed to talk about her English marks in secondary school. I met her when we started our own company in '97.

She suffered 14 interviews, with the prep, interview - panel, group, or solo - taking a lot of her daytime. It was grueling. She met Mark, and it went very well. Her new boss and reports were making all kinds of positive noises about starting work soon.

A sub-stellar response from some French guy from Interview #3 torpedoed it. The rejection after all the essays, questions, prepared interviews and research was absolutely crushing and almost derailed the MBA programme she was on.

This is actually standard gdpr / data protection verbiage. It means the company cannot use your data for its own purposes, only to provide you services you agreed upon. Selling your data to a third party, or sending you marketing emails you didn't subscribe to, isn't "providing you with services or products" so it is explicitly forbidden.

This is completely separate. It's something they ask when you apply for a job with them.

And if I apply at like age 40?

Even using a website requires basic info like what browser and IP address. The device information to work out the layout of the site for mobile tablet or desktop. And for downloading the ISO they would need to load balance and locally serve or the budget will just be used for servicing there ISP bill.

Not really. I only hate it personally because I find it inflexible, opinionated, and oversimplified compared to KDE Plasma.

If it works well for you, use gnome! Linux is all about choice after all.

We don't surveil you, unless we feel like it.

It wasn’t my gateway, but I do remember when it started and rapidly became my distro of choice because of it’s focus on a good, easy, well supported desktop. sigh

Nowadays I just use Debian Stable.

Lots of proprietary drivers/firmware and helper-programs for those drivers. You can probably get more insight by checking out what's included in Debian's "non-free" and "contrib" repositories.

According to https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/15792/debian-considers-the-ubuntu-font-family-non-free-why:

The problem appears to be around the requirement that modified versions which are not "substantially changed" must maintain the "Ubuntu" name - section 2.3 of the license:

    2.3 Modified Versions which are not Substantially Changed must be renamed to both

       1. retain the name of the Original Version and
       2. add additional naming elements to distinguish the Modified Version from the Original Version.

See Launchpad for a long discussion; the argument is that while the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) allow a copyright holder to require the name of derivatives be changed, the DFSG do not allow the copyright holder to specify how the name be changed. It is potentially worth noting that Fedora also considers the license non-free, but for different reasons.

TBH to me that doesn't seem like strong enough grounds to not copy it manually to your Guix install, though I can see why distros might not want to package it. Canonical could probably have circumvented this issue by just using a more established license ... one has to wonder how much of this is sheer ignorance, and how much is calculated discouragement of using their fonts on other distros.

Lemmy keeps a lot more than that…

One could say that Ubuntu's original purpose has become obsolete ... they could still strive to provide the best Linux Desktop experience, period, but nowadays it's kinda hard to stand out that way and it doesn't pay the bills unless one wants to get serious about computers with preinstalled Linux. Which might actually have happened if the Ubuntu phone had been a (commercial) success, but alas.

depends who owns your server, but usually just your email and pass and content you post, probably the ip too

And don't ask us how often that happens.