7 ms·

Huge red flag. What extraordinary thing did Canonical accomplish by the way? Making a Debian distro for first year uni students?

by hcks 3y ago

weinzierl 3y ago
You're reading too much into this. It is just a casual joke from a long time ago and I find the rest of the copy is quite good.
rhaway84773 3y ago
Canonical’s greatest contribution was probably distributing Ubuntu installation CDs for free anywhere in the world on demand. This was a pretty big deal at the time before broadband was easily available. Canonical was also focused on user friendliness more than any other distro. Which was also important for desktop Linux’s growth. I must be missing something, but TBH I’m finding it hard to remember any major technical contributions from Canonical. They’ve also had a pretty disturbing history of NIH syndrome, wasting years of effort on alternatives to what the rest of the Linux community is going forward with before deciding to abandon their alternative.
- rlpb 3y ago
  > I must be missing something, but TBH I’m finding it hard to remember any major technical contributions from Canonical. Parallelized service start on desktop boot and other similar desktop boot optimizations come to mind. But yeah, mostly it's the remaining 80% work of polish (in the sense of the adage of the remaining 20% actually being 80%) needed to make a Free Software system usable by the masses. Lots of work and lots of value but this doesn't involve significant technical advances, just hard work by smart people who truly understand the whole stack technically but are also able to see from the perspective of ordinary users. Canonical also pioneered Launchpad and Bazaar. Today they are eclipsed by GitHub and git, but at the time they led in Free Software distributed development tooling. Early GitHub was apparently modelled on Launchpad for example. There's a really interesting retrospective that explains a lot of what you see of Canonical and community and contributions here: https://www.jelmer.uk/pages/bzr-a-retrospective.html https://www.jelmer.uk/pages/bzr-a-retrospective.html Oh, and container technology. You'll need to look into the details of that to understand exactly what Canonical did and didn't contribute, but Canonical's contribution was significant. > NIH If you look into the specifics most of the things commonly cited as Canonical NIH predate or at least were already in progress at the time of the alternative. Disclosure: I work for Canonical but wasn't involved in the work cited above.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Canonical, for better or worse, was also willing to take a less doctrinaire approach to including software that was encumbered in various ways (e.g. MP3 at the time) than Debian and Fedora which made it a better out-of-the-box experience for casual users.
    - gopher_space 3y ago
      At this point you might have been rolling your own video drivers and hoping your CRT didn't explode, so it was a bit of a step up.
    - vetinari 3y ago
      Canonical, being incorporated on Isle of Man, could make moves, that distributions rooted in US could not. MP3 is the prime example.
robertlagrant 3y ago
> Huge red flag What could be worse than a small joke from 20 years ago?
- glistenemployed 3y ago
  I’ve also willingly subjected myself to this draconian interview process once and what I gathered from one of the engineers is that Mark Ubuntu is still very much hands-on and still very much antagonizing. Take that as you will, but there’s probably not been much change since that small joke from 20 years ago.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    I wouldn't call that joke antagonizing particularly, though? Or do you mean something separate?
    - 0xffff2 3y ago
      It's certainly antagonizing to me, but maybe that's just because I work for the government and like to think that I do extraordinary work.
      - robertlagrant 3y ago
        Hey, don't worry. Everyone who pays taxes works for the government :-)
        r00fus 3y ago
        More like investors... or subscription customers. But not employees.
        robertlagrant 3y ago
        I think your metaphor is going in the wrong direction! Customers and investors have a choice. We pay the government or we get locked in a box we helped pay for (-:
pohuing 3y ago
It's also not true and gp corrected themselves
dagw 3y ago
What extraordinary thing did Canonical accomplish by the way I'm not sure you remember what the Linux landscape looked like when Ubuntu was first released, but it was a pretty huge deal at the time. So much more hardware and software (esp. media playback) worked out of the box than any other distro at the time. USB and wireless networking just worked. The desktop they provided was was really nice and well configured as well with most defaults working the way most people expecting them to. Plus the pretty amazing fact that they would send you an install CD, for free, basically anywhere in the world. Back when downloading 700 MB over the internet was an impossibility for most people, this was a seriously huge deal for getting Linux into the hands of people. You could take that free CD, pop it into almost any computers, just accept all the defaults and be pretty sure to have a working Linux desktop at the end. At the time, that was a huge accomplishment. We can all have opinions about the choices Canonical has made over the years and what they have become, but let's not pretend that they weren't one of the biggest and most significant drivers of Linux on the desktop back in the day.
- aulin 3y ago
  Please, desktop was plain GNOME. Same experience as fedora, arch, and every other gnome based distro. They had a good installer (ubiquity?) and a permissive policy with proprietary software and codecs. They had a dedicated installer for proprietary drivers (jockey?) and a huge repository (universe) with packages, drivers and codecs that other distros like fedora and debian deemed more ideologically or legally questionable. That's what set them apart, people wanted mp3 codecs and Nvidia drivers. And they had consistent branding, with nice identitary themes, color, wallpapers. Something community based projects always failed to achieve.
  - NegativeLatency 3y ago
    On what planet is the Arch Linux install process the same as the Ubuntu install process. As someone at the time who didn’t know anything about Linux and had dialup internet, it was extremely handy to be able to pop in a disk and get running like I was used to with other OSes
re-thc 3y ago
> What extraordinary thing did Canonical accomplish by the way? Credited for creating the most painful interview process.
wodenokoto 3y ago
With fear of creating another Putnam moment on HN what exactly did you do that is so much greater than Ubuntu?
- graton 3y ago
  So they should compare their accomplishments to something that has had hundreds of full-time employees working on since 2004?
  - wodenokoto 3y ago
    Well, apparently parent doesn't think that is an accomplishment, so yes.
- IshKebab 3y ago
  He didn't say he did do something incredible. Mark Shuttleworth did.
count 3y ago
Heh. Curious, how old are you? When did you start using linux? I feel like we may be approaching a generational gap in 'brand' equity.
kzrdude 3y ago
Ubuntu is now the "Windows" of the Linux world. It's pretty successful if you ask me.

Huge red flag. What extraordinary thing did Canonical accomplish by the way? Making a Debian distro for first year uni students?

by hcks 3y ago

Huge red flag. What extraordinary thing did Canonical accomplish by the way? Making a Debian distro for first year uni students?

weinzierl 3y ago

You're reading too much into this. It is just a casual joke from a long time ago and I find the rest of the copy is quite good.

rhaway84773 3y ago

Canonical’s greatest contribution was probably distributing Ubuntu installation CDs for free anywhere in the world on demand. This was a pretty big deal at the time before broadband was easily available. Canonical was also focused on user friendliness more than any other distro. Which was also important for desktop Linux’s growth. I must be missing something, but TBH I’m finding it hard to remember any major technical contributions from Canonical. They’ve also had a pretty disturbing history of NIH syndrome, wasting years of effort on alternatives to what the rest of the Linux community is going forward with before deciding to abandon their alternative.

rlpb 3y ago
> I must be missing something, but TBH I’m finding it hard to remember any major technical contributions from Canonical. Parallelized service start on desktop boot and other similar desktop boot optimizations come to mind. But yeah, mostly it's the remaining 80% work of polish (in the sense of the adage of the remaining 20% actually being 80%) needed to make a Free Software system usable by the masses. Lots of work and lots of value but this doesn't involve significant technical advances, just hard work by smart people who truly understand the whole stack technically but are also able to see from the perspective of ordinary users. Canonical also pioneered Launchpad and Bazaar. Today they are eclipsed by GitHub and git, but at the time they led in Free Software distributed development tooling. Early GitHub was apparently modelled on Launchpad for example. There's a really interesting retrospective that explains a lot of what you see of Canonical and community and contributions here: https://www.jelmer.uk/pages/bzr-a-retrospective.html https://www.jelmer.uk/pages/bzr-a-retrospective.html Oh, and container technology. You'll need to look into the details of that to understand exactly what Canonical did and didn't contribute, but Canonical's contribution was significant. > NIH If you look into the specifics most of the things commonly cited as Canonical NIH predate or at least were already in progress at the time of the alternative. Disclosure: I work for Canonical but wasn't involved in the work cited above.
- ghaff 3y ago
  Canonical, for better or worse, was also willing to take a less doctrinaire approach to including software that was encumbered in various ways (e.g. MP3 at the time) than Debian and Fedora which made it a better out-of-the-box experience for casual users.
  - gopher_space 3y ago
    At this point you might have been rolling your own video drivers and hoping your CRT didn't explode, so it was a bit of a step up.
  - vetinari 3y ago
    Canonical, being incorporated on Isle of Man, could make moves, that distributions rooted in US could not. MP3 is the prime example.

robertlagrant 3y ago

> Huge red flag What could be worse than a small joke from 20 years ago?

glistenemployed 3y ago
I’ve also willingly subjected myself to this draconian interview process once and what I gathered from one of the engineers is that Mark Ubuntu is still very much hands-on and still very much antagonizing. Take that as you will, but there’s probably not been much change since that small joke from 20 years ago.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  I wouldn't call that joke antagonizing particularly, though? Or do you mean something separate?
  - 0xffff2 3y ago
    It's certainly antagonizing to me, but maybe that's just because I work for the government and like to think that I do extraordinary work.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      Hey, don't worry. Everyone who pays taxes works for the government :-)
      - r00fus 3y ago
        More like investors... or subscription customers. But not employees.
        robertlagrant 3y ago
        I think your metaphor is going in the wrong direction! Customers and investors have a choice. We pay the government or we get locked in a box we helped pay for (-:

pohuing 3y ago

It's also not true and gp corrected themselves

dagw 3y ago

What extraordinary thing did Canonical accomplish by the way I'm not sure you remember what the Linux landscape looked like when Ubuntu was first released, but it was a pretty huge deal at the time. So much more hardware and software (esp. media playback) worked out of the box than any other distro at the time. USB and wireless networking just worked. The desktop they provided was was really nice and well configured as well with most defaults working the way most people expecting them to. Plus the pretty amazing fact that they would send you an install CD, for free, basically anywhere in the world. Back when downloading 700 MB over the internet was an impossibility for most people, this was a seriously huge deal for getting Linux into the hands of people. You could take that free CD, pop it into almost any computers, just accept all the defaults and be pretty sure to have a working Linux desktop at the end. At the time, that was a huge accomplishment. We can all have opinions about the choices Canonical has made over the years and what they have become, but let's not pretend that they weren't one of the biggest and most significant drivers of Linux on the desktop back in the day.

aulin 3y ago
Please, desktop was plain GNOME. Same experience as fedora, arch, and every other gnome based distro. They had a good installer (ubiquity?) and a permissive policy with proprietary software and codecs. They had a dedicated installer for proprietary drivers (jockey?) and a huge repository (universe) with packages, drivers and codecs that other distros like fedora and debian deemed more ideologically or legally questionable. That's what set them apart, people wanted mp3 codecs and Nvidia drivers. And they had consistent branding, with nice identitary themes, color, wallpapers. Something community based projects always failed to achieve.
- NegativeLatency 3y ago
  On what planet is the Arch Linux install process the same as the Ubuntu install process. As someone at the time who didn’t know anything about Linux and had dialup internet, it was extremely handy to be able to pop in a disk and get running like I was used to with other OSes

re-thc 3y ago

> What extraordinary thing did Canonical accomplish by the way? Credited for creating the most painful interview process.

wodenokoto 3y ago

With fear of creating another Putnam moment on HN what exactly did you do that is so much greater than Ubuntu?

graton 3y ago
So they should compare their accomplishments to something that has had hundreds of full-time employees working on since 2004?
- wodenokoto 3y ago
  Well, apparently parent doesn't think that is an accomplishment, so yes.
IshKebab 3y ago
He didn't say he did do something incredible. Mark Shuttleworth did.

count 3y ago

Heh. Curious, how old are you? When did you start using linux? I feel like we may be approaching a generational gap in 'brand' equity.

kzrdude 3y ago

Ubuntu is now the "Windows" of the Linux world. It's pretty successful if you ask me.