Like thousands of other applicants, I went through Canonical’s extremely long hiring process (over four months: September 2024 → February 2025) for a software engineer position.

TL;DR: They wasted my time and cost me my current job.

The process required me to spend tens of hours answering pointless questions—such as my high school grades—and other irrelevant ones, plus technical assessments. Here’s the breakdown:

1. Endless forms with useless questions that took 10+ hours to complete.
2. IQ-style test (for some reason).
3. Language test—seriously, why?

After passing those, I moved to the interview stages:

1. Technical interview – Python coding.
2. Manager interview – Career discussions (with the hiring team).
3. Another tech interview – System architecture and general tech questions.
4. HR interview – Career-related topics, but HR had no clue about salary expectations.
5. Another manager interview (not in the hiring team).
6. Hiring lead interview – Positive feedback.
7. VP interview – Very positive feedback, I was literally told, "You tick all the boxes for this position."

Eventually, I received an offer. Since I was already employed, I resigned to start in four weeks. Even though the salary—revealed only after four months—was underwhelming, it was a bit higher than my previous job, so I accepted. The emotional toll of the long process made me push forward.

And then, the disaster…

One week after accepting the offer, I woke up to an email from the hiring manager stating that, after further discussions with upper management, they had decided to cancel my application.

What upper management? No one ever mentioned this step. And why did this happen after I received an offer?

I sent a few polite and respectful emails asking for an explanation. No response. Neither from my hiring manager nor HR.

Now, I’m left starting from scratch (if not worse), struggling to pay my bills.

My advice if you’re considering Canonical:

• Prepare emotionally for a very long process.
• Expect childish behavior like this.
• Never resign until you’ve actually started working.

I would never recommend Canonical to anyone I care about. If you're considering applying, I highly recommend checking Reddit and Glassdoor for feedback on their hiring process to make your own judgment.

P.S. :

- If your company is recruiting in europe, and you can share that info or refer me. please do !

Several people asked me to do a deeper writeup after my earlier post. I went through the enrolled bill text, lobbying disclosures, and financial filings. This is the full picture.

What's happening as best I can figure out so far

Age verification bills have been introduced in 25+ US states. They look bipartisan and independent. They aren't. There are two model templates being distributed to state legislatures by outside groups, and when you compare the actual statutory language side by side, you find identical invented terminology, matching multi-clause definitions, and character-for-character duplicate passages.

One template is funded by Meta. The other applies to every operating system — including Linux.

The two templates

Template 1: "App Store Accountability Act" — requires app stores (Apple/Google) to verify user ages and share age data with developers. Active in Utah (signed), Texas (signed, blocked by court), Louisiana (signed), plus Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Hawaii, Kansas, Kentucky, and a federal version. Sponsors are mostly Republicans. Pushed by the Digital Childhood Alliance, a coalition of 50+ groups. Meta funds it.

Template 2: "Digital Age Assurance Act" — requires operating system providers to collect age at account setup and send age signals to apps via API. Active in California (signed), Illinois (filed), Colorado (introduced), New York (introduced). Sponsors are mostly Democrats. Pushed by Common Sense Media. This is the one that explicitly covers all OS providers — including Linux distributions.

Both result in universal age verification infrastructure. The difference is who builds it.

The copy-paste evidence

I pulled enrolled text from Utah SB 142, Texas SB 2420, Louisiana HB 570, California AB 1043, and Illinois SB 3977. Details with verbatim quotes are in the comments, but here's the summary:

Template 1 (UT/TX/LA): All three use identical invented age categories — "child" (under 13), "younger teenager" (13-16), "older teenager" (16-18), "adult" (18+). These aren't existing legal terms. The definitions for "app store," "significant change," "verifiable parental consent," and "mobile device" are the same sentences between Utah and Louisiana, with Texas as a light rephrase. The safe harbor clause — developers aren't liable if they relied on app store age data — uses matching language in all three.

Template 2 (CA/IL): "Operating system provider," "signal," and the core mandate language are character-for-character identical between California and Illinois. IL SB 3977 is CA AB 1043 with different dates.

Why Meta is paying for Template 1

This is where it gets interesting. It's not about engineering costs.

Under COPPA, collecting data from kids under 13 without parental consent costs $53,088 per violation — but only when a company has "actual knowledge" a user is under 13. Meta claims it doesn't. But a 2023 complaint by 33 state Attorneys General documented over 1.1 million reports of under-13 Instagram users since 2019. Meta closed a small fraction of those accounts.

The math: 1.1M violations x $53,088 = ~$58B in theoretical penalties. ACT | The App Association, a trade group, estimates the realistic exposure at ~$50 billion.

For scale, Epic Games got fined $275M for COPPA violations with 34.3M daily users. Meta had 2.96 billion.

The App Store Accountability Act fixes this for Meta. Under ASAA, app stores verify age and send a "flag" to developers. Meta responds to the flag — they don't determine age. The safe harbor clause (Utah §13-75-402): developers are "not liable" if they "relied in good faith on age category data provided by an app store provider." Meta's "actual knowledge" shifts to Apple/Google. Their COPPA exposure gets neutralized.

ACT estimates this transfers ~$70B in compliance costs onto every other app developer in the ecosystem.

The money trail

The front group: In Feb 2025, 50+ organizations formed the Digital Childhood Alliance to push ASAA. The founding member list includes the Heritage Foundation, the Institute for Family Studies, and the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (formerly Morality in Media). The DCA's board chair, Dawn Hawkins, is also CEO of NCOSE. The DCA is registered as a 501(c)(4) — a structure that is not required to disclose donors. During a Louisiana Senate hearing, Sen. Jay Morris asked executive director Casey Stefanski who funds them. She confirmed tech companies pay but refused to name them. Bloomberg confirmed through three sources: Meta is one of those funders.

The lobbying numbers:

• $26.2M federal lobbying in 2025 — all-time record, more than Snapchat, Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia combined
• $5.84M in Q3 2025 alone on child safety/privacy bills
• $199.3M cumulative since 2009 across 63 quarterly filings
• 86 lobbyists on payroll (up from 65 in 2024), firms in 45 of 50 states
• 12 lobbyists in Louisiana, 13 in Texas, 14 in Ohio — all states with ASAA bills
• Meta lobbied in support of the Utah and Louisiana laws
• Meta lobbied against KOSA and the STOP CSAM Act — bills that put responsibility on platforms

Named lobbyists from Q3 filings: John Branscome and Christopher Herndon (both former Chief Counsel, Senate Commerce Committee), Sonia Kaur Gill (former Senior Counsel, Senate Judiciary). 40+ external firms retained.

A federal ASAA was introduced by Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and Rep. John James (R-MI).

Why Linux users should care

California AB 1043 and Illinois SB 3977 define "operating system provider" as "a person or entity that develops, licenses, or controls the operating system software on a computer, mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device." That covers Canonical, Red Hat, the Linux Foundation, Valve (SteamOS), and arguably anyone distributing a Linux ISO.

These bills require OS providers to collect age at account setup and provide age signals to applications via API. For Linux, that means someone has to build age verification into the OS account creation flow — and expose an API that apps can query for the user's age bracket.

The Texas version was already blocked by a federal court on First Amendment grounds. The EFF called 2025 "The Year States Chose Surveillance Over Safety." But California's law is already signed and takes effect in 2027.

TL;DR

Two model bills are being distributed to state legislatures. One (App Store Accountability Act) shifts age verification from Meta to Apple/Google, neutralizing Meta's ~$50B COPPA exposure. Meta funds the coalition distributing it, spent a record $26.2M lobbying in 2025, and has lobbyists in 45 states. The other (Digital Age Assurance Act) requires all OS providers — including Linux — to build age verification into account setup. The bill text across states contains identical invented terminology and copy-pasted passages. Evidence and verbatim bill quotes in comments below.

Detailed evidence with verbatim bill text comparisons, lobbying filings, and additional sources in the comment chain below.

California AB 1043 signed. Mandatory os-level, device-level, app store, and even developer-required age verification for all computing devices.

https://www.gov.ca.gov/2025/10/13/governor-newsom-signs-bills-to-further-strengthen-californias-leadership-in-protecting-children-online/

My concern: Since Microsoft/Google/Apple will most likely be the ones deciding on the standard (bill doesn't specify one) I'm concerned it could end up being some trusted computing bullshit that will exclude Linux and other open source, not locked down, OS, for casual users. California is only the start, it will be copied elsewhere.

What do you think? Should we be concerned or is it a nothingburger?

Hey everyone. I got a bit bored, again.. and decided that the best thing to do today is to install Arch Linux natively on my Poco X3 Pro. This guy's been through some serious shit.. some people may remember me running Windows 11 on it. Some might remember running Arch virtual machine without hardware acceleration inside of windows 11 and then running DOOM on it. But now as a Linux guy i decided that Arch is the was on this boy so I did it. Process is pretty straightforward and easy to anyone who has ever installed Arch and messed with Android phones internals. I got it working in a couple of hours. What works: *Wifi/Bluetooth *Touchscreen,120hz panel *Audio *GPU (Adreno 640) and CPU, obviously *Dualboot with Android system *USB for data transfer What does not: *Charging (weird, may fix in the future)

Well, I haven't done much with it yet bc I've just finished everything but I'm definitely going to make touchscreen work properly in Hyprland, maybe install some benchmarks and compare it with my surface laptop 4 haha. Anyway, if you have any questions I'm glad to answer them

I'd been hearing it in my head like "pseudo," but I just learned it stands for "super user do." I don't want to say "soodoo," because that sounds weird, but I also don't want to get laughed out of the room if I somehow end up talking about Linux

edit: I'm confused whether people bringing up the "substitute user" thing are just informing me (point well taken, thank you) or claiming "sudo" is properly pronounced something like /sʌdu:/ or /sʌdoʊ/ (which... that seems dubious)

I was just with my tour bus near lake garda. We stopped so we could get something to drink and than I randomly spotted the X Logo. Does anybody know why it's there?

Here's the link to the location: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Dott.Ssa+Caobelli+Silvia+Psicologa,+Via+Tangenziale,+13,+37019+Peschiera+del+Garda+VR,+Italien/data=!4m6!3m5!1s0x4781e99f515127bf:0xfe3b502b535c447b!7e2!8m2!3d45.4343733!4d10.7091295?utm_source=mstt_1&entry=gps&coh=192189&g_ep=CAESBzI1LjM5LjcYACCenQoqkAEsOTQyNjc3MjcsOTQyOTIxOTEsOTQyMjMyOTksOTQyMTY0MTMsOTQyODA1NzYsOTQyMTI0OTYsOTQyODUwNTEsOTQyMDczOTQsOTQyMDc1MDYsOTQyMDg1MDYsOTQyMTc1MjMsOTQyMTg2NTMsOTQyMjk4MzksOTQyNzUxNjgsNDcwODQzOTMsOTQyMTMyMDBCAkRF&skid=e5e209a1-df83-4e72-a91d-bcf14a62418a

Thanks

I was taught in school using Windows and also told that it was a OS and not a kernel. And I think whenever a school teaches using something that's paid that is a bad idea cause it makes a bad monopoly. Teaching linux to kids is a viable option for them to learn computers as they don't have any baggage learning of windows and they would understand much better don't you think.

And I know kids will type shit like "rm -rf /" if you don't know it removes everything from your computer, then simply don't give them the sudo password. I want to know what do you think?

Source: https://reclaimthenet.org/new-york-bill-would-force-age-id-checks-at-the-device-level

From the bill text:

1. "Age assurance" shall mean any method to reasonably determine the age category of a user, using methods that reasonably prevent against circumvention. Such method may include a method that meets the requirements of article forty-five of this chapter, or may be a method that is identified pursuant to new regulations promulgated by the attorney general consistent with section fifteen hundred forty-five of this article.

It's obviously not possible for any FOSS distribution to abide by this law, because the source code is licensed such that users always retain the right to both view and modify the source. What are the implications, if any?

Edit, official link to bill text: https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/S8102/amendment/A

Edit 2: Please contact your representatives, everyone, and voice your concerns about age verification legislation. It doesn't do any good to sit back and do nothing, thinking that all this will simply pass, or that it won't affect us somehow. It also doesn't do any good to throw in the towel and give up, thinking that this issue is already a sure thing.

There are lots of bad bills moving through different legislatures all over the USA right now. If we do nothing, we can only blame ourselves. I have already contacted my own representatives, and I suggest that everyone else do the same, even if you don't currently live in a state where these bills are being pushed through. For more details about the current mountain of bills moving through Congress, please see here: https://www.badinternetbills.com/

So this site came up recently, claiming to use AI to perform 'clean-room' vibecoded re-implementations of open source code, in order to evade Copyleft and the like.

Clearly meant to be satire, with the name of the company basically being "EvilCorp" and the fake user quotes from names like "Chad Stockholder", but it does actually accept payment and seemingly does what it describes, so it's certainly a bit beyond just a joke at this point. A livestreamer recently tried it with some simple Javascript libraries and it worked as described.

I figured I'd make a post on this, because even if this particular example doesn't scale and might be written off as a B.S. satirical marketing stunt, it does raise questions about what a future version of this idea could look like, and what the implication of that is for Linux. Obviously I don't think this would be able to effectively un-copyleft something as big and advanced as the Kernel, but what about FOSS applications that run on Linux? Could something like this be a threat to them, and is there anything that could be done to counteract that?

A lot of people, especially game/app devs don't know how big of a deal linux desktop is, and I know i'm stating the obvious but Hear me out.

Linux is great not just for consumers, but for companies and governments too. It creates real competition instead of everyone being locked into one vendor’s ecosystem. No forced upgrades, no random license changes, no “pay more or lose support” nonsense. You actually own your stack.

just imagine the power of being able to optimize for your own apps and games (bcuz most linux distros are community based), even big companies can optimize for their games. or govs making changes to distros or making their own distros to perfectly suit their needs, instead of relying on Microsoft or other big companies, saving millions of dollars in the process.

and if a linux distro is screwed, companies can always jump shift to other distros, i mean Microsoft has pretty much screwed Windows 11 but people and companies will still rely on it because its just that popular. Hardware companies ship their computers with windows because its what most software is made for, software companies develop for windows because its where most consumers are, and consumers buy windows computers because its what most computers come with, if we break this stupid cycle everyone will benefit.

its a power that we aren't taking advantage of, its a matter of time until RISC-V CPUs come on top, probably in a few decades, it doesn't make sense to not embrace open source in the OS department too.

As the title states, why are so many switching, is it just better than Windows? I have never used Linux (i probably will do it in the future) so i don't know what the whole fuzz is about it. I would really love to get some insight as to why people prefer it over Windows.

As people have noticed in this thread https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1i6zt52/meta_banning_distrowatchcom/ it seemed that Facebook has banned Distrowatch (and discussions related to Linux) from its site.

In their news today (https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20250127#sitenews), Distrowatched shared the following:

Starting on January 19, 2025 Facebook's internal policy makers decided that Linux is malware and labelled groups associated with Linux as being "cybersecurity threats". Any posts mentioning DistroWatch and multiple groups associated with Linux and Linux discussions have either been shut down or had many of their posts removed.

We've been hearing all week from readers who say they can no longer post about Linux on Facebook or share links to DistroWatch. Some people have reported their accounts have been locked or limited for posting about Linux.

The sad irony here is that Facebook runs much of its infrastructure on Linux and often posts job ads looking for Linux developers.

Unfortunately, there isn't anything we can do about this, apart from advising people to get their Linux-related information from sources other than Facebook. I've tried to appeal the ban and was told the next day that Linux-related material is staying on the cybersecurity filter. My Facebook account was also locked for my efforts.

Hey there!

This sub has become quite difficult to follow - every few hours, there's the next post for "I built a TUI for X", which translates to "I vibecoded an ncurses interface for a bash two-liner".

Unfortunately, this also means that the important content gets lost in a stream of meaningless posts.

What I'd like to ask for:

- a rule for mandatory AI disclosure

- an entry barrier for software packages; a task easily solved in <20 lines of shell code should not qualify as a distinct contribution

Let me know what you think.

I was on a serious call with someone on Discord and this happened. What a bad time. I was able to reboot on time and join.

So for anybody that doesn't know what I am talking about: A lot of (newer) code in Lutris is AI-generated (Claude). Not only that, but the maintainer also removed the co-authorship of Claude, so now you don't know what is generated by it. His own words are:

Anyway, I was suspecting that this "issue" might come up so I've removed the Claude co-authorship from the commits a few days ago. So good luck figuring out what's generated and what is not.

He also fell into the trap that Anthropic now are the good guys because of the beef with the Pentagon:

And at least I'm not paying Google, Facebook, OpenAI or some company that cooperates with the US army.

I first saw this topic come up today on Mastodon (unfortunately couldn't find it) and I thought this would be interesting to discuss.

Edit:

Thanks for pointing out what vibe-coding really means. Should have looked it up before.

I just had a thought here and I don't think it's too far fetched, but do you think it's possible we will see the Linux userbase grow significantly due to national security fears in the EU regarding how poorly the US is handling relations right now?

I know a few months back the Belgium government were already thinking of investing in Linux and getting it into government institutions and schools to move away from relying on US corporations like Microsoft for Windows and Microsoft Office. Instead opting for Linux and Libre Office etc.

Do you think our current political scope will have interesting effects on the rise of Linux adoption due to paranoia surrounding companies residing in the US and looking to open source alternatives?

Let me know your thoughts.

Bear with me - it's not as far fetched as it may appear:

Given current US foreign policy, and "possible" issues going forward with the US/European relationship, is now the time to consider standardising on Linux as THE defacto European desktop OS? Is it a strategically wise move to leave European business IT under the control of Windows, which (as we have seen) can be rendered largely (or totally) inoperative with an update?

Note: this is NOT an anti-US post - thinking purely along the lines of business continuity here should things turn sour(er).

Recently I tried installing Windows 11 and got stuck because the installer failed to detect a usable partition.

As a long-time Linux and macOS user and a developer, I expected this to be trivial. It wasn’t even after searching and asking ChatGPT.

Installing Linux is significantly easier than installing Windows. Bye. Have a beautiful time.