It is a problem for being for-profit. When you're for-profit, you're seeking profit, and personal data gives you that profit. No way to not connect the dots.
You can entirely be for-profit and earn your profit without the reselling of personal data. It was more common before net 2.0, for example Google first served you one or two links of ads based on your search. No saving and forwarding user data, just simply "for X amount, your webpage will be displayed to users searching Y keyword"
Google was at the beginning of the market to sell the data, it didn't exist before. Obviously they didn't try to scrape every ounce of it before they made (not them specifically, but they played a big role in it) a market to sell it on. The second it became profitable, they started doing it.
You can theoretically be for-profit and don't do anti-human shit, but that will be going directly against the only reason for-profit companies exist: maximising shareholder value. So those companies either don't survive or change for the worse.
If you can't understand what the difference between the for-profit organization, and a non-profit with operational cost, you need to go way back to the basics
Yep, soooon, but really it doesn't make or break anything for me.
X11 (to me) just means a project already works and there's nothing to fix.
Tbh, if Mint had a KDE version, I'd use it instantly, no idea why they want to dedicate resources to remaking the same desktop everyone else already makes, but worse.
Gdm is slow and buggy comparatively, imo. Gnome has always lagged behind on stability and speed for me, and Cinnamon doesn't do much to fix those issues for its simplicity.
For its simplicity, were I to choose less features and the minimal design Cinnamon goes for, I'd rather just have XFCE instead. Similar look and function, more mature, if older.
This really comes out if you try KDE on a lower-powered system like an ARM phone. KDE-touch is way more grounded and quick than the gnome solutions.
Mint is a repo with a few packages (including a config file that removes snap, based) for Ubuntu. Ubuntu's KDE packaging sucks. Source: installed Plasma on Mint once. Surprisingly usable, though. Also, some dependency brings in a fontconfig file that makes all fonts made by google ugly as fuck. Forgot filename but it had a ChromiumOS copyright header, go figure yourself.
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
Ooh, I knew about the Debian switch but didn't know about thr btrfs. Currently using SpiralLinux as my daily driver but might have to look into Tuxedo at some point.
Debian for daily driver laptops, mint for your mom's daily driver laptop, OpenSuSE for desktop gaming, BSD for the servers, and life is good. Real good.
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.
"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"
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.
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.
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.
The logs part doesn't make sense to me, tbh, but not having to upgrade does.
I had an old laptop on lubuntu 16.04 LTS for a long time with extended security updates, because the next LTS had higher system requirements. Sure i could have found another lxde/lxqt distro, but it worked great on lubuntu, and for the low price of $0 i could avoid needing to do that.
I guess their business model is to let people try it free on their personal machines, and then get the Munichs of the world to pay for this kind of extended security support.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sounds like they talked to a lot of people and then either purposefully ignored them, or just literally stopped putting any work into the font license after the release. The FAQ you linked claims that they tried improve on the standard SIL license by adding clarifications, but the Fedora bug thread that's linked in the Stackexchange answer looks like Canonical's license is actually considerably more ambiguous.
Yeah the other reply has a lot of good information, but it's also briefly mentioned on the wikipedia page. Debian and Fedora consider it to be non-free, and it's not FSF-approved.
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.
Yeah like the other reply said, most of the actual kernel is libre since its gpl licensed, but you still need firmware blobs for a lot of devices that are proprietary. The libre kernel is patched in such a way that they don't even allow you to load firmware if you wanted to, so you need the regular linux kernel for that.
84 replies
"Your private data is extremely important to us, as we make money from it", how the hell do they manage to be this shady x(((
It's a for-profit corporation, always was. The only thing changed is people started to actually care about it a bit
no problems with being for-profit, the problem is getting money from selling the private date of those using your product
It is a problem for being for-profit. When you're for-profit, you're seeking profit, and personal data gives you that profit. No way to not connect the dots.
You can entirely be for-profit and earn your profit without the reselling of personal data. It was more common before net 2.0, for example Google first served you one or two links of ads based on your search. No saving and forwarding user data, just simply "for X amount, your webpage will be displayed to users searching Y keyword"
Google was at the beginning of the market to sell the data, it didn't exist before. Obviously they didn't try to scrape every ounce of it before they made (not them specifically, but they played a big role in it) a market to sell it on. The second it became profitable, they started doing it.
You can theoretically be for-profit and don't do anti-human shit, but that will be going directly against the only reason for-profit companies exist: maximising shareholder value. So those companies either don't survive or change for the worse.
I have bad news for you, non-profits need money too
If you can't understand what the difference between the for-profit organization, and a non-profit with operational cost, you need to go way back to the basics
Um... I do understand but I am not sure you do.
Better than default doesn't mean perfect.
yeah I remember applying to them years ago, it was bad haha
Ubuntu was my gateway into Linux, but man I'm glad I ditched it years ago.
Same 💪🏻 (Mint pleb)
Ah, yes, green Ubuntu. Nice.
They also make green Debian!
Linux Mint, maker of 'Slow XFCE' aka Cinnamon
Aren't we switching to Wayland later this year? Not an area of my expertise but I've heard about it
Yep, soooon, but really it doesn't make or break anything for me.
X11 (to me) just means a project already works and there's nothing to fix.
Tbh, if Mint had a KDE version, I'd use it instantly, no idea why they want to dedicate resources to remaking the same desktop everyone else already makes, but worse.
Fair. I don't have big opinions about desktop environments, at least not yet. What gets you so excited about KDE?
Gdm is slow and buggy comparatively, imo. Gnome has always lagged behind on stability and speed for me, and Cinnamon doesn't do much to fix those issues for its simplicity.
For its simplicity, were I to choose less features and the minimal design Cinnamon goes for, I'd rather just have XFCE instead. Similar look and function, more mature, if older.
This really comes out if you try KDE on a lower-powered system like an ARM phone. KDE-touch is way more grounded and quick than the gnome solutions.
I'm lucky I overbuilt my PC then I guess. Interesting though... Looking at different KDE distros I can see the appeal of Garuda Dr460nized.
Mint is a repo with a few packages (including a config file that removes snap, based) for Ubuntu. Ubuntu's KDE packaging sucks. Source: installed Plasma on Mint once. Surprisingly usable, though. Also, some dependency brings in a fontconfig file that makes all fonts made by google ugly as fuck. Forgot filename but it had a ChromiumOS copyright header, go figure yourself.
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.
Tuxedo OS is based on Ubuntu but they're doing to make the switch to Debian testing as a base, with extra checks, btrfs with Snapper as default.
This might be my next distro of choice.
Ooh, I knew about the Debian switch but didn't know about thr btrfs. Currently using SpiralLinux as my daily driver but might have to look into Tuxedo at some point.
Yeah. If they manage it properly and push security updates on time it might be worth it.
Debian for daily driver laptops, mint for your mom's daily driver laptop, OpenSuSE for desktop gaming, BSD for the servers, and life is good. Real good.
(This is bait, but only a little. :D)
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.
"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"
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.
We don’t sell your data except when we sell your data.
When have any of you given them your private information?
Sorry, I clicked on accept once when I was 12 and now they allowed themselves to steal everyone's. :/
It was you!
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.
You get security updates without Ubuntu pro.
Extended updates past the normal eol
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.
The logs part doesn't make sense to me, tbh, but not having to upgrade does.
I had an old laptop on lubuntu 16.04 LTS for a long time with extended security updates, because the next LTS had higher system requirements. Sure i could have found another lxde/lxqt distro, but it worked great on lubuntu, and for the low price of $0 i could avoid needing to do that.
I guess their business model is to let people try it free on their personal machines, and then get the Munichs of the world to pay for this kind of extended security support.
Nah. Nope. That's not what this says.
Your Lemmy server keeps your email for logins. Requires less language.
Lemmy keeps a lot more than that…
depends who owns your server, but usually just your email and pass and content you post, probably the ip too
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.
We don't surveil you, unless we feel like it.
And don't ask us how often that happens.
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!
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.
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.
That was a really interesting rabbit hole. Thank you.
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.
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
I skip anyone that requests it, it‘s not a good sign to me. It‘s them screening undesirables.
You know when someone says "your X is extremely important to us" it's always the opposite.
No, it is important to them because it makes them money.
Canonical was good, then the Amazon Affiliate link in the Sidebar happened, after that it only went down hill.
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
The turning point for me was when they started making a Windows-style start menu with web search enabled by default.
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.
How is this a meme?
It has Ubuntu in it
Thank you for helping me form an opinion about Canonical.
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?
Absolutely necessary to know how I, at unspecified age, performed in high school, perhaps as long as 3/4 of my lifetime ago.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
According to https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/15792/debian-considers-the-ubuntu-font-family-non-free-why:
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.
They go into a lot of detail here about why they forked an exisiting license, but i don't understand the copyright stuff.
https://canonical.com/legal/font-licence/faq
Sounds like they talked to a lot of people and then either purposefully ignored them, or just literally stopped putting any work into the font license after the release. The FAQ you linked claims that they tried improve on the standard SIL license by adding clarifications, but the Fedora bug thread that's linked in the Stackexchange answer looks like Canonical's license is actually considerably more ambiguous.
Yeah the other reply has a lot of good information, but it's also briefly mentioned on the wikipedia page. Debian and Fedora consider it to be non-free, and it's not FSF-approved.
The “regular kernel” is not libre?
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.
Yeah like the other reply said, most of the actual kernel is libre since its gpl licensed, but you still need firmware blobs for a lot of devices that are proprietary. The libre kernel is patched in such a way that they don't even allow you to load firmware if you wanted to, so you need the regular linux kernel for that.
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.
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)
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.
all the while it is not even simpler to those coming from windows