Why it is named multipass?

With heavy feelings toward once loved Ubuntu community I have to write this letter. Long time ago I had the idea of unified authentication system using the name multipass as in “Leeloo Dallas”. The idea is “stolen” from a movie, but that doesn’t matter. It is a dream.

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Not that I progressed much on that dream over the years. I registered some short 5 letter domain and became a possessor of Estonian e-Residence eID, which even got ported to Fedora by community (I use Ubuntu and Fedora). But now… now that “now hideous” CanonicalLtd corporation “took over” that dream and “oppressing” it by replacing the original meaning of this beautiful name in the media for something else. I am “outraged”, “depressed” and curious… Why multipass and not some ubuntu-machine?

There are many projects out there and of course sometimes people come to the same conclusion when it comes to naming. Canonical’s multipass allows a cross-platform Linux experience, very much like the multipass of the movies that gets Leeloo universal access to places and things. ubuntu-machine does not reflect the nature of this project and was not considered. Sorry that the names clash.

I do wonder why you use terminology like “took over” and “oppressing” as that is highly inaccurate. The open source world is full of projects that have names. Project names are not exclusive to someones idea unfortunately.

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Just for the dramatic Hollywood effect. Nothing serious. :wink:

Does that mean the multipass goal is to be run on Windows as well? I see there are MacOS installers there. Is it aiming to run Fedora as well and trying different Linux distributives easily without rebooting and leaving my current desktop?

We are exploring all possibilities at the moment.

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It would be nice if it could compile a graph of possible variants and propose that to user - LXD, podman, VM, …