This is from a very long time ago, but if you dig deep enough you can still find this gem. From memory, and not the precise wording: The Canonical jobs page used to say you should only apply if you have accomplished something extraordinary in your life. If you haven’t you should apply here, where here liked to the US government website. EDIT: I misremembered the site, it was not on canonical.com but http://markshuttleworth.com/work.html Around 2004 it said: “Brilliant. Tell me about things you’ve done in which you have truly excelled. I don’t mind if you did brilliantly at school and then crashed at university because you were more interested in something else, just tell me about the something else! It could be an open source piece of software you wrote and which has been widely used. It could be a small business you’ve setup and run. It could be that you were consistently in the top 10% of your class at school or university. It could be that you are a natural leader or organiser. If you haven’t done brilliantly at something in life, try applying here, you’ll fit in just fine” The very last “here” was a link to http://www.whitehouse.gov/
Someone says:
Huge red flag. What extraordinary thing did Canonical accomplish by the way? Making a Debian distro for first year uni students?
And this reply is quite good:
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.
— Source
Them I’m going to just cite some things I found interesting:
SuSE and other mainstream distros worked “out-of-the box” just as well, or better, than the early Ubuntu versions. Fedora, Debian, etc didn’t not work because they couldn’t, but they were trying to make a point about free software and what that meant, so they took a strict stance on included licensed code. It was 2 minutes of adding RPMForge to your repos to fix, however.
The early versions of Ubuntu weren’t popular because they were easier, they were popular because they followed the AOL model and would send you an install disc for free. They leaned into making the install process easier much later (around the 6…7 versions).
That’s about CDs:
The one real reason they were popular and the one real accomplishment. No doubt.
I agree here. The CDs were a popularity hack. I have some of them, or maybe I had. They were in a foreign country I’m not living in, and have no plans to ever visit.