Good luck moving forward and I hope you find something you enjoy twice as much.
Thanks, everyone. 
I’m not really too worried; just bad timing.
I did enjoy university work last time I tried it. It tends to be a little bureaucratic, but it’s also nice being around energetic students. I’ll have to check if there’s anything open nearby.
ReactOS is interesting; I didn’t realize it was still around. A Windows clone seems like an odd choice though, since I’ve been avoiding Windows for ~20 years.
I’ve never tried to get security clearance, but I’m somewhat familiar with the process. Some friends could point me in the right direction if I need it. However, I have lost projects before when they became classified. There was this remote-control deep-sea sub we designed so that land-locked researchers and professors could pilot the thing real-time during class, in deep parts of the ocean, discovering new species and such. We got it far enough to demo in a lake, and then DARPA bought it and it disappeared. I assume they’re now using it to play underwater spy-vs-spy.
There are all sorts of awesome things being created, but I don’t know what most of them are. I keep finding cool stuff lately though, like open-source music hardware. Some interesting ones are the Linnstrument, the Atmegatron 8-bit synth, and the Axoloti synth/effect board. And that’s just part of one specific industry; this sort of thing is happening everywhere.
There’s also a 3D printer company close to me where a couple friends work. It’d be a pretty convenient option, though I don’t know what sorts of jobs they have open.
Or a friend at Red Hat told me to come join him. I’d feel a bit weird about that though, since I accidentally created their package management software and I’m still a little embarrassed about it.
Or I’ve been tempted to start the Society Moderately Against Extremism, to encourage people to calm down and use empirical approaches to tricky topics, but I have no idea how to pay the bills that way.
Or find a consulting / support role in a tech company, since I’m a weirdo who likes both tech and people.
Or perhaps I’ll stop rambling, get some sleep, and think about it more later.
Here’s to finding a cool new job that’s interesting, challenging, and loaded with great people to work with. 
Make the most of you’re involuntary sabbatical. :partying_face:
Good luck with finding a great job! From what I gather, you have everything in house for that.
Well, it does seem like choices are going to abound for you. As far as the ReactOS thing, avoiding Windows and working for ReactOS are not mutually exclusive! All the reasons I personally try to avoid Windows seem to be the same reasons ReactOS exists! In fact, if ReactOS had been at the same level of usability as Ubuntu in 2004, I would have probably never used Linux. Now, if it’s the NT architecture or some other root-level characteristic of Windows that you’re actively avoiding, then ReactOS is off the table. They are a “clone” of Windows in the same way that Linux is a “clone” of Unix.
I am writing this on my laptop running Ubuntu 16.04, have been using Unity desktop since 10.10 and can not believe that I am going to loose unity? I have no clue what to replace it with. I guess I have until 2020 or something to figure it out. I did run Arch with unity desktop for a short while, maybe the community will continue to develop the desktop even if Ubuntu have decided to take a step back. I have been excited about Ubuntu for phone/tablet as well, but always felt it wouldn’t make it because of the wast majority’s lack of interest in anything but Android/whatevertheapplesystemscalled.
So, I was sad to read about this both for you personally and for the future of Ubuntu, best of luck to you in your new situation!
Elchund
Hope all goes well. Sometimes a little change, or reset is a good thing.
The primary issue is that a TS SSBI is averaging around a year to complete due to the backlog. So having an existing clearance will get you fast tracked in a lot of places.
actually, any clearance takes a year… But you are right - DC needs citizens with clearance right meow.
I don’t know what you did at Ubuntu, but if you have a compsci degree from an accredited 4 year university, and the aptitude to program, i suggest getting into Salesforce asap, as this field is on fire right now, particularly for citizens:
The backlog on a Secret is 4-6 months right now.
Indeed!
Sorry to hear about the recent turn in your fortunes. Best of luck finding something suitable.
I currently have 540 xterms open, if that says anything, plus a couple dozen virtual private servers in lightweight containers, my dotfiles are managed in a revision control system, and I think Richard Stallman has been right about a lot of things even if he does have a whole closet of tin-foil hats.
While I feel for people who are mourning Unity, it’s not exactly going to disappear… it just won’t be developed by the company any more. It’s like if I came down with a bad case of “hit by a bus” syndrome, it wouldn’t mean people had to stop using bistro. I personally never liked Unity though, particularly the new version 8 because it involved switching from X11 to Mir. Mir is widely regarded as a huge mistake, and would even interfere with my ability to do simple things like typing or clicking because it lacks network transparency.
I’ve mostly stayed as far as possible from Unity, though I have occasionally chatted with its developers. At the beginning, Unity’s goal was to make “a universal desktop for everyone”, from the oldest grandmother to the geekiest hacker. The team solicited input from people who weren’t using it, to find out what they needed. So one day at a sprint I sat down with them and was like “okay, let me show you how I use a computer…” About 45 minutes later they stumbled away with headaches, and nobody ever mentioned “universal” again. The official project goal changed to “a friendly desktop for humans”.
LOL, they should know better than to encourage me.
Really though, I consider the entire project to have been a mistake from the beginning. It was created because Gnome 2 became Gnome 3, and everyone disliked Gnome 3 for the same reasons nobody liked Windows 8. So the company had to decide whether to maintain Gnome 2, switch to a UI people disliked, or take some other approach. And for reasons I’ll never understand, they took the most expensive option, creating a brand new UI from scratch, and then gave it exactly the same issues as what they were trying to avoid. Within the year, Ubuntu lost its top spot on the distro popularity rankings, a position it had held since birth 6 years earlier. Linux Mint took over, continuing along Ubuntu’s original path, and is still more “ubuntu” than Ubuntu itself these days.
Then there were some other big mis-steps. Ubuntu One, the Dropbox and iTunes clone, was a dumpster fire from beginning to end. The whole Amazon-search-in-dash thing really pissed people off. Mir was so controversial that Intel started rejecting patches related to it. Pretty much the entire developer community left. On the server side, cloud efforts went really well and are still pretty awesome today. But the desktop side of things really shot itself in the foot.
In the beginning, Ubuntu took the best the community had to offer, put it together into a coherent well-curated package, and made things “just work” by default. Everyone loved it. Other distros were terribly fiddly and inflicted a great deal of unwanted choice on people. Meanwhile, Ubuntu pretty much just did what everyone in the community wanted, and it was great. But over time it gradually changed from not inflicting choice to not allowing choice. It became more and more like the proprietary systems people were trying to get away from, and it lost a great deal of community good will and “mind share”.
The phone was initially very popular, raising more money than any other crowdfunding campaign in history. It promised to do what people have wanted since before “smart” phones existed — to finally make a phone which can do exactly the same things a desktop can do. Of course, the campaign ultimately failed due to not meeting its astronomical funding goal, and everyone got a refund. I suspect this was probably intentional, a way to demonstrate interest to other companies without actually incurring any concrete obligations. But people really wanted it.
We had this mature, robust, versatile platform people relied on for daily work, and promised to bring it to the phone. But instead, the company made a brand new incompatible platform with most of the same problems as Android or iOS, and tried to get people to migrate to it. To encourage that, it then started migrating the desktop to the same janky platform. Totally the opposite of what people wanted, so it’s no wonder it failed. I mean, really, who wants yet another iPhone clone?
Anyway, I’m not surprised I got kicked out. I haven’t been at my best there, because it’s difficult to watch something one used to love being slowly torn apart. I think the most difficult incident was a presentation given by a former VP at a sprint, intented to be motivational. I don’t need to go into details, but I went directly to my room afterward and cried.
But I am surprised at how many amazing people are being laid off, with more coming every day — particularly those who aren’t even involved with the dropped projects.
At least for me it’s a kick in the pants to go do something healthier.
The most motivational, inspiring thing I’ve heard lately was Eben Moglen’s keynote speech at LinuxConf.au, which kinda makes me want to go save the world. His speech has been on my mind almost daily now for two years. The man is an absolute rock star, and he is almost single-handedly responsible for my career still being legal in the US.
BTW, I feel a disclaimer is appropriate: None of what I say about this stuff is official. I’ve mostly been an outsider without access to the “inside scoop” on anything. For quite a while it was my job to listen to the community and be their voice within the company, but I never really got to interact with upper management much or know what they were doing. I was, as usual, kind of an alien, and I don’t speak in any official capacity.
Also, it’s a bit ironic to be leaving just as the change I’ve suggested all along finally happened. It’s probably a better direction for Ubuntu… but I doubt they want a smug, arrogant goddess hanging around rubbing their noses in it.
Sorry for writing a book here. I hope at least some of it was interesting.
“I hope at least some of it was interesting”
Yes, it was! Unity to me provides an excellent desktop for “daily no-brain” use, I do not use it for work. As long as I know how to use the command line and can install some extras to customize the desktop it has worked out fine for me. I do realize that a lot of the public this desktop was meant for do not use the command line, and will not be interested enough to find out there are a lot of ways to customize unity. The kids find it easy to use on their old thinkpads, incomprehensible to me though, that I have to use wine to install Scratch (2) for them to use, but that is not Ubuntu’s fault.
I would have bought the phone, and no doubt loved it, if I ever felt that it was ready for real-life use, and that ubuntu was 100% behind it. I never got that feeling. I got the controversy around MIR, seems so odd for Ubuntu to alienate itself from what seems like the entire Linux community, which in itself is Linux’ no 1 selling point, in my eyes at least.
Never a good thing to be forced to move on, especially with the financial concerns of unemployment, but maybe it was time anyway. Best of luck anyway, no doubt you will find something more interesting to do.
Elchund
Hi TK
Nothing worse than that feeling of being blindsided - it’s a real devaluing feeling.
Allow yourself some time to kick the dirt and be pissed off but the secret is not to stay in that phase for too long before you start thinking ‘onwards and upwards’.
Humans are very resourceful especially when they’ve been thrust into a situation that needs quick thinking. Think of all the skills you have and where your specific industry is heading and be open to anything and keep trawling your network
A lot of systems and apps are moving out of data centres or on prem and into the cloud - maybe the clouds are for you ?
Positive thoughts only
Regards
A good read though. Maybe they feel they need sojers more than innovators.
Yeeeeeeah…… yeah. I’m still trying to figure out how this seemingly obvious point was missed while making high-level decisions.
Perhaps. I probably should have gone cloud-side ages ago. I’ve had my own private cloud for about a decade, though I’ve gotten a bit behind on recent developments. But I have this bad habit of sticking around long after I should have moved on, going down with the ship, so to speak. It’s not even that I don’t smell what’s in the wind, I just feel obligated to not let people down.
Good luck to you!
How about adding some lyrics to your song?! :sunglasses:
I am your average Joe when it comes to flashlights. I have been given the gift of writing poems and philosophical quotes,probably why I was hoping/waiting for some lyrics!!
Hah, the first version had some lyrics. I could show you, but then I’d have to kill you.
I normally only listen to instrumental music, since lyrics all sound like a foreign language to me.
Anyway, have you heard the joke about the guy who played a country song in reverse? He got his job back, his wife back, his truck back, and his dog came back from the dead. If I added words, it’d be kind of like that… only not in reverse.