also this insane hiring process

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[–] 135 points 3 months ago (6 children)

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

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  • [–] 10 points 3 months ago (4 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago*

    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)

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  • [–] 43 points 3 months ago (1 child)

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

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  • [–] 40 points 3 months ago (6 children)

    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!

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  • [–] 41 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 23 points 3 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 11 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 37 points 3 months ago (1 child)

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

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  • [–] 108 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    "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"

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  • [–] 43 points 3 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 20 points 3 months ago

    Thank you for helping me form an opinion about Canonical.

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  • [–] 20 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

    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.

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  • [–] 20 points 3 months ago (1 child)
  • [–] 51 points 3 months ago (12 children)

    When have any of you given them your private information?

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  • [–] 42 points 3 months ago (9 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 11 points 3 months ago (4 children)

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

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  • [–] 14 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    You get security updates without Ubuntu pro.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

    Extended updates past the normal eol

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  • [–] 8 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago*

    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.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago (2 children)

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

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

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 17 points 3 months ago (8 children)

    "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(((

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago (7 children)

    It's a for-profit corporation, always was. The only thing changed is people started to actually care about it a bit

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (6 children)

    no problems with being for-profit, the problem is getting money from selling the private date of those using your product

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (5 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)

    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"

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 0 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    I have bad news for you, non-profits need money too

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  • [–] 10 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    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?

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (2 children)

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

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  • [–] 8 points 3 months ago

    Better than default doesn't mean perfect.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 months ago

    yeah I remember applying to them years ago, it was bad haha

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    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)

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • Isn't Ubuntu the Linux version of Windows. Like highly corporate, cares more about money. Forces things on you, and of course privacy problems. Like windows. But on Linux

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