markshuttle

These bug reports are most appreciated; we fully expected to run into corner case issues like this.

The team working on Rust coreutils have been loving the feedback wider testing provides, and I am sure that 25.10's wide usage will enable Ubuntu 26.04 LTS to be confident in the new stack. It will also enable other distros to consider making the same change.

Your free personal Ubuntu Pro subscription does in fact cover as many VMs and containers as you can run on up to five personal machines, as the OP well knows. I like that we make Ubuntu Pro, including universe updates, free for anyone running at small scale.

In my experience it's university access that's very heavily shaped by privilege, not high school.

High school is a sort of universal misery - pretty much everyone who might be applying for a job with us, from almost any country, would have gone to high school. Rich or poor, you had to suffer through it. Yes, you're a different person now than you were then, but it's still interesting to hear how people handled work and social dynamics. There is plenty of good science which correlates young adult behaviours with lifelong outcomes. And as one part of an interview process, it's a useful reference point that is less susceptible to circumstance than things like "which university did you go to".

We now hire much from many more countries than we used to, and it feels good to me that we're giving opportunities to work on open source to a wider audience. Sure, you can be cynical about our intent. Invent elaborate motivations for our process. Perhaps the answer is as simple as this - we want to work with people who are conscientious and care about getting open source into more hands, in an easier to use form, at the lowest cost. Now, that's not the worlds most profitable software strategy, but it feels good to me to make that the focus of a days work. Terrible, right? Crazy, right?

Well, yes, it was a shitty and unnecessary jab. Sorry for that. But really, it was a jab at the GW Bush White House administration, not the civil service. I grew up a great fan of the US and Bush-Iraq felt like something important in the world had died. It felt like stupidity on a generational scale, that would have terrible consequences for the US. And that was before the torture.

Exactly :) It was still a brat comment though. I'd forgotten about that. Thank goodness we grow out of some things.

If I remember correctly, the candidate was interested in a product management role for our cloud offerings, which is something that I care a great deal about. Hi, Rui ;) And yes, I'm on calls through lunch and dinner, so I sometimes get to have lunch or dinner with candidates.

It's quite right that commercial entities tend to focus on commercial imperatives. But Canonical is unusual - I founded it precisely to support a more open approach to open source than I was seeing from the other enterprise Linuxes in the early 2000's. We have a nearly 20 year track record of balancing community and company interests in Canonical and Ubuntu, in part because I have sufficient control of the company to stay true to that original vision.

Of course, things may change at Canonical if I am no longer involved. That's a reasonable risk to think about and have a plan for. Some paranoia is constructive. One of the nice things about open source is that you can fork it if you want to. But to do so just because Canonical might in future take a different view than we have to date seems like its paying too high a price for that paranoia :)

We have no plans to drop support for any other distro. I like that open source serves more users and use cases than its creators imagined :) We've moved our development to the Canonical github repos because that's the only way we can continue to set the policy for the project, but we have not lost interest in LXD, nor are we forking it (we're the upstream), nor are we opposed to contributions that enable other distros that we haven't got to.

That speculation is simply incorrect. We've never had a discussion about dropping support for other distros. Open source is better when more people use it, and that means its better to have it used on other distros.

We've always tried to be at the forefront of new kernel capabilities - especially security and container tech - and it helps that Ubuntu generally has very modern kernels. On Ubuntu we can make releases of the kernel and LXD that line up nicely. Other distros with older kernels have always been supported as well as possible, and I don't see why that would not continue. There is certainly no plan at Canonical to inhibit that.

Emotive analogy, but lets run with it.

We've all decided to build with sustainable local materials, which anybody can dig up without harming the environment. That's wonderful! Unfortunately, the materials sometimes turn out to have asbestos in them.

Canonical and a large number of friends enjoy digging, and they make those local materials available for free, no digging required, as Ubuntu. So Ubuntu happens to be a free source of pre-dug materials which is popular for lots of reasons.

People with big buildings who like using Ubuntu need the asbestos removed if its found, and Canonical has started to do that for them commercially. Canonical have also said they are happy to remove the asbestos for free for small buildings, as long as the big-building people keep funding them to do it. The more big building people choose Canonical to sort out this issue, the better it will be for everyone using Ubuntu, even if they don't do any digging themselves.

Seems like a great deal for people with smaller buildings, as long as people with big buildings also think it's a good deal. Since I happy to like helping people with smaller buildings, I think this is all pretty square.

We have a set of criteria for things we always did in universe, and we'll keep doing those things, as will other members of the Ubuntu community. Even without Pro you are better off using Ubuntu than another free distro if you care about security updates- there are more free updates, even in universe, than in equivalent open-ended repos anywhere else. Pro just makes that open-ended repo much better, and adds an SLA for people who have to report on security patch compliance.

Over the years, companies have started asking us to do more for them in universe, and now that body of work is available to all customers. We are making it freely available to you and others under a personal subscription. I think that's rather elegant, I hope more and more companies see Ubuntu Pro as a very cost-effective way to get full compliance for their estates, and I hope we can keep growing the set of things we make available for free as a result.

If you look at the range of packages covered, and the numbers of issues addressed, it's way, way more than any other enterprise Linux offering. If it were possible to provide enterprises with this level of security update coverage for free, then I'm sure someone would have figured out how to do that. I couldn't figure out how to fund full security coverage of universe without having customers for that work. In the end, I think the Ubuntu Pro free personal subscription is a very nice way to balance what are ultimately conflicting desires between people who quite understandably want more and more for free, and people who are able to buy the work that they need.

Not true.

The Canonical security team and wider Ubuntu contributors will still make best efforts to update universe. Neither the team nor I are interested in degrading a prior experience for our free users. We know what the criteria were for those best-effort universe updates, and they remain unchanged.

What's changed is that there is now a much larger team that will systematically fix every high and critical vulnerability in universe, with an SLA. That's a huge improvement, it's great for enterprise users, it enables people to use Ubuntu in regulated and mission-critical environments. It also makes me very happy that we give it free for personal use on 5 machines.

People have different views of what matters, or how to do things. Whatever your views, there are going to be some people that agree with you, and some people that disagree.

Broadly speaking, when you lead something, the people who will step up to lead alongside you will be people who mostly agree with the position you take. Obviously. Why would they align and invest precious years in something they totally disagree with? It would be dysfunctional to have a leadership team in any organisation made up of people who have hugely different opinions about everything at a fundamental level.

Of course, that group has disagreements on stuff. We spend a lot of time talking about the things we disagree on, but we live with people we broadly agree with.

So from the outside it may look like the leadership team of any company are highly aligned. If you have been at Canonical, you know that in the leadership team we have lots of hard debates and discussions, all the time, in search of the best. You also know we are all working to the same goal, which is to help people consume open source cheaply and safely, at scale, across all kinds of compute.

So, here's how I interpret your comment. You saw a group of people that were broadly supportive of a position I hold, and which you disagree with. Sure, you disagree, and that's fine. Calling them sycophants is just finding a nasty word for people who happen to be aligned on something you disagree with.

Life after high school is also full of trauma and difficulty. I think one of our problems in society today is that advertising and social media pump out a false narrative of beauty and success which makes people feel like failures just because they are suffering and struggling, when both of those things are the act of living as far as I can see.

How do you deal with adversity? How do you deal with peer pressure? How do you motivate yourself to work on things that feel irrelevant? How do you choose your hobbies and the people you associate with? Those are important things to assess in a potential colleague. And this is just one potential angle on how one might assess them.

As for "making stuff up that sounds good", you are correct, some people are better at that than others. Fortunately we have clear and objective measures of that to work with so forewarned is forearmed.

You're welcome :)

There are always lots of opinions about how to build a piece of software. Unlike a hundred yard dash, where the best performance is obvious to all, the risks and benefits of different engineering approaches remain a mystery until years after some work is done.

I've been around for those years :)

When we need something difficult and fundamental thought through very deeply, because it has to be precisely correct, I've learned to trust our CTO. Others usually want to go faster, or fix-it-later, or we-don't-need-a-spec-just-be-agile. That creates tension. But when I think it needs to be done very carefully and correctly, some tension is worthwhile.

I wish we had been more careful with some of the foundations for Unity, for example, because they would then have served others better even if the project itself failed.

I can see how you would draw those conclusions, because yes, we have made mistakes, and we do have some products that are proprietary, and we have made some shitty software.

At the scale of hundreds of engineers working on tens of codebases, who hasn't?

That's my dispute with your position - it's flatly generalising and characterising ALL our work as if it was our least successful work. By all means, call us out on our mistakes. But if you think everything we have ever done was hopeless, then you must have some theory about why so much of what we do has in fact been widely adopted. Surely you can see how fragile your own arguments must be if they are at odds with some clear data.

I like challenges and criticism; it helps us get better. I know we have made mistakes, that helps us get better too. I respect people who have differences of opinion on what needs doing, or how it needs to be done. Why not take the opportunity to become a counterpart in a rich discussion, rather than a one-dimensional anti-everything-Canonical mouthpiece?

We killed Unity for three reasons. First, I ran out of money to fund it. That was rough. Second, we built some very shoddy pieces in that codebase (though we also had some teams that did amazing work). That was sad and taught me a hard lesson. Third, we were the fourth horse in a two horse race, and the telco and ISV ecosystems were clearly not going to engage.

I agree with you - the vision of Unity was and still is beautiful. It's probably right - convergence between phones and tablets and laptops is the future for laptops. I think it's fantastic that a small but feisty community continues to work with that code. I was therefor, like you, completely disappointed to fail.

But why hate on me, and Canonical, when we literally put everything we had on the line for that vision, but screwed up? Why be an ass to the sorts of people who are willing to put every ounce of strength they have into something that you really wanted to see succeed? We failed because we made mistakes, yes, but for heavens sake recognise an ally when you see one, even if they make mistakes.

Yes, data shapes decisions. Should that not be the case?

A hiring lead is expected to find the best candidates, not just the ones with a higher number on a simplistic test. Your point is correct that a hiring lead with bad judgement or low engagement might get a bad result, but what hiring process cannot be undermined in that way?

When you don't like something, it's common to mischaracterize it with anecdotes of stupidity, then say it must be stupid. The argument is basically "a biased and obnoxious hiring manager could misuse that data to make biased and stupid hiring decisions". Yeeeeeees. Obviously.

The psychometric test we use is a series of numbers covering different aspects; it's simplistic, but not as simplistic as I reflected with a single number.

Hiring leads often progress a candidate that didn't ace that test because they see evidence of excellence in other data. And I often reject offers to candidates who aced that test because I think the result doesn't gel with reality, although I will usually interview a candidate if I have concerns about an offer.

No, it's not normal. But your conclusion that I did this because I don't trust colleagues is mistaken. I did it to figure out how we should shape the hiring process, and so I could relate to the workload and problems that hiring leads face daily.

When you are going to ask your colleagues to tackle a hard problem, and do it in a different way than they did before, it helps if you have actually done it yourself. If that is going to be lots of work, and if it's going to make them vulnerable to trolling on social media, even more so ;)

We started to plan growth a few years back, but seemed to be struggling to get people in. Hiring managers would say "there were no good candidates", which didn't seem right to me. Back then, every hiring manager did things independently, as they saw best. We had very little standard process other than HR onboarding.

When an opportunity came up for me to hire, I adopted a new process, then expanded that to cover a number of roles. Once the process was relatively settled, we picked a small number of senior people, and they ran this process across all roles, with a weekly meeting for us to figure out how to evolve it further.

As you can imagine, this change caused all sorts of angst. Reddit is not the only group that has thoughts :) Many of the same assumptions and opinions expressed here were expressed internally, some resigned. Systemic change in an organisation is painful, this one was particularly hard.

Now, however, most see the benefits.

Our flow of applicants has increased 2-3x. We now have 10-20,000 applicants per month, much more widely representing the world's talent. We are making more appointments than ever in our history. Our weekly meeting is now mostly a celebration of new hires - the whole hiring lead team looks at every new hire's resume and talks over the process of hiring that candidate, then discusses improvements to the process. We are able to analyse the data in our hiring process and look for any indications of bias at each stage, then engage and address it if we have concerns.

You ask if the "CEO is pushing for a candidate" biases the process. You misunderstand my role as hiring lead. I am not pushing for a candidate, I am simply running a few roles as a hiring lead. My job as a hiring lead is to do the initial lightweight screen, then let the process do the work. I don't meet candidates in my roles until the very end of the process, and then only sometimes. I'm running the process to hire for other managers, not for myself. Those managers meet the candidates in late-stage interviews. My job as hiring lead is to make sure we have a good bench of candidates before we make an offer.

Some of the roles I run, which attract the bulk of the applicants, are open-ended roles, for "engineering manager" or "engineering lead". When candidates get to me in those roles, if I think they are great I then send them to a manager who is looking for someone like that. So it has been my great pleasure to give tens of amazingly great candidates to my colleagues for consideration for roles they hadn't even started to hire for. Think how nice that feels, for me and for that manager :)

To circle back to the beginning - beware the trap of "normal". You will never achieve something exceptional if you limit yourself to normal.

We don't.

That was a regrettable exchange, and contrition was expressed.

I'm not sure whether you are poorly informed or simply over-generalising.

Then we are in agreement :)

Or, it allows for the conversation to start naturally from that point. "In your written interview, you observed that... can you expand on that?"

Exactly. Also, a craftsman would treat their screwdriver with respect and care, too.

To be clear, we are hiring lots of people every month now. We have 10,000-20,000 applications per month, it's just that we have a very high bar, and we are rigorous about it which takes time and effort.

Also, our process doesn't work as well for some roles and some locations, so we continue to evolve it.

But on balance, I am very happy with the growth of our teams and the calibre of our new colleagues.

High school is also a very similar experience for people all over the world, which is not the case for university or work experience. If you are interested in understanding underlying interests, social dynamics and attitudes in a global pool of applications, then you are interested in things which are similar globally even if the connection might not be obvious.

Who you are, and what you have done, are of course two very different things.

We generally discuss salary after we've got through early-stage interviews. By then we have a sense of whether someone might be great at Canonical, and we're trying to figure out where they might fit best. If a candidate has higher salary expectations, then that narrows the list of roles we could consider them for. If you had interviews after the HR interview, then I guarantee you that comp was not the reason not to proceed.

In our case, we are remote first across 50+ countries, so not really in the business of trying to import colleagues to one country or another.