Note that both the community council and most moderators are volunteers not employed by Canonical.
i wish i could understand why people would volunteer their time for a for-profit corporation.
this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2025
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atleast its a Privately held company
Why the fuck does an operating system have ANY rules relating to queerness?
Edit: why are y'all downvoting them for being out of the loop?? Lemmy get your shit together
They don't- a moderator to an online ubuntu forum community (that recently became official) misapplied a rule about keeping things apolitical as meaning someone shouldn't describe themselves as queer.
Ubuntu has made a statement correcting the interpretation made by the moderator
thanks. I had the same question as the person you replied to here. People should be able to describe themselves however they want.
Isn't everything political these days. So you'd be able to talk about nothing.
I have been to several interviews for in office positions. I have no issue with in office positions but I get the feeling they don't like my "political" position of wearing a mask.
Thatβs the whole point of that rule. Itβs taboo to discuss things in polite conversation that those in power donβt want you to discuss.
I think it's unfair to say that's the point of the rule on a foss project's discussion forum
Political discourse online gets really fucking toxic really quickly π often driven by entirely legitimate anger and hurt over the state of the world, but we can't just pretend it's all an evil conspiracy by big Ubuntu to silence us.
Folks on the internet consistently demonstrate through behaviour why "no politics" is almost always a rule anywhere where folks might perceive it to be off topic, whether one thinks it's the correct ruling or not (it's entirely valid to feel it should be allowed even though it brings out the worst in people, though I'm sure that would put incredible strain on moderators given the internet baseline of interpersonal compassion)
And the places online where folks do discuss it? Can quickly get extremely unpleasant, or develop an inescapable undercurrent of hostility that starts to permeate all other interactions on the platform.
Personally I think actually productive political conversation is almost always emotionally laborious, and it's important to be able to step away from the political aspects of things and catch your breath, even though everything is political. But everything being political doesn't mean it's healthy for every conversation to be political, that's a recipe for burnout and people acting like their worst selves, which is counter productive to pretty much any meaningful political goal.
Ubuntu has a diversity policy to explicitly welcome and encourage participation, mentioning that they explicitly honor diversity in sexual orientation among other things. It does not explicitly mention queerness.
A moderator made a bad a call. It sounds like there may have been some confusion about the word queer used as a slur vs a self-identification.
Ubuntu has a diversity policy to explicitly welcome and encourage participation, mentioning that they explicitly honor diversity in sexual orientation among other things.
I think that things would be far better if these type of informations should not be disclosed by anyone in context like this, where they are irrelevant.
Sure, maybe you don't need to put your sexual identity in a post asking for help configuring nginx, but in an introductory post where you're explicitly describing yourself... Yeah, I think you should be allowed to mention your sexuality.
Bruh it literally happened this afternoon, chill.
Also, the direct link is more readable: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/on-discourse-rules-about-politics/66986
Ah, that's fair, between ADHD and my sleep disorder my sense of time is pretty dysfunctional π
For me it was yesterday, I didn't process that not even a day had passed for folks without my weird sleep schedule
The update was also posted in the original thread
Gotcha, when I looked I completely missed that
I don't get the hate for Ubuntu. It's easy to use, and there is nothing nasty you are forced to use, e.g. you can choose how much non-foss stuff you want to install, analytics are opt-in, etc.
my only real problem is snaps. and how often they seem to come up with community-hurting stuff like snaps.
like when they put amazon ads in ubuntu. i'm pretty sure they were sending your searches to amazon at some point. or when they decided to fork gnome 3 instead of helping the team fix it properly.
I use an unbuntu respin that is pretty close to stock ubuntu.
Snaps can go to hell
Snaps made me personally stop using Ubuntu.
I just went back to Debian and I'm happy.
The initial thing that gave me the ick was when Amazon was integrated into their search for money.
Unity is also pretty bad. Laggy, weird, and it just isn't cool looking
I run kubuntu and Ubuntu server on a couple of my machines, so I am not a total hater, but lately I've been moving to other distros.
One thing I really miss from Unity is the efficient use of the top bar doubling as a title bar for full screen windows. I wish modern DEs would do this.
i'm pretty sure KDE can still do this
I think they've had a number of controversies over the years, but I think the big frustration people have at the moment is really just that snaps are kind of a crummy thing in several respects, don't have an open source backend, and often don't work as well as flatpaks (to my understanding)
The increasing commitment to going down that path is a big turn off for many, and disqualifying for some.
That being said, I have used and been happy with Ubuntu in the past. I think some of the dislike is just motivated by "thing popular", especially since it's so popular with folks new to linux who are still figuring things out
Just here to add that, yes, Snaps are very broken. Do not use them if you value your time or well-being.
The annoying thing is that Canonical dishonestly co-opts your apt invocations for snap installations, so you're likely to waste hours of your life trying to figure out why the thing you installed doesn't work or takes forever to launch randomly. And they keep Snapifying more of their distro, so even things like GNOME packages are only available as Snaps.
Snaps are basically the only reason I don't use Ubuntu.
Thats kinda worse even than I thought :/
Thank you for sharing additional perspective I appreciate it!
Honestly, I donβt think Snaps are so bad. Canonicalβs top market is enterprise, and Snaps are ideal for deploying applications in these environments. If youβre an end-user, you can literally just uninstall the runtime
Snaps are bad for two reasons:
- The backend is proprietary & the client doesn't support other backends without modifying the source code
- For some packages, doing
apt installinstalls the Snap instead
There's no good reason for either. Canonical is simply setting things up so they can squeeze money out of their users by enshittifying over time.
they're also great for software bom's