Ask HN: What in the world is taking Ubuntu so long?

Posted by linsomniac 2 hours ago

Ubuntu has CVE-2026-98432 marked as a 9.8, but yet it's coming up on a week with no update to fix it. It's still marked as "work in progress" (though at least now they've listed a mitigation):

https://ubuntu.com/security/CVE-2026-98432

I've had mitigations in place for a week, but this response is really shaking my confidence in Ubuntu. I'm just trying to understand what is going on with Ubuntu. Do they have too many kernels (that page is loooong), do they not have enough automation in the build/test pipeline, are their engineers overwhelmed?

We are moving into a world where there are going to be vastly more security issues; if you can't keep up now, where are you going to be in the next 6 months?

For a long time keeping on top of OS updates has been a huge part of keeping the attackers at bay. However, the world is changing.

Comments

Comment by AnotherGoodName 1 hour ago

It's Canonical. The company that literally asks for high school grades and a multi-page essay on any job application and will pass if you're not in the 99th percentile of year 9 maths even while requiring many years experience (which means you probably don't even know what your year 9 maths scores were). All the while they pay a fraction of any other Bay Area tech company.

What i just described isn't a joke or an exaggeration either. It's literally part of the application process and you can look this up.

Anyway they are quite simply hopelessly mismanaged and no one should be touching Canonical products at this point.

Comment by Hasz 52 minutes ago

I worked there for a couple years. IMO, the hiring process holds Canonical back from scaling like a typical tech co, but they probably don't want to. It also attracts a very specific type of person; everyone I personally worked with was very bright and capable.

IME, because of pay, they have a hard time retaining "senior" talent, eg Nvidia, Chainguard, Amutable, Lambda, etc etc etc all have lots and lots of senior+ Canonical engineers. Especially in the age of AI, I think this is a "people-strategy" mistake.

The application process is very long and you absolutely lose great candidates because of it. Salaries are not US-tech competitive, but absolutely are Central/South America and Europe competitive. Lots of great Brazilian and Polish engineers, for example.

Also I have never seen a post on HN, Reddit etc about Canonical/Ubuntu that doesn't complain about hiring process. I think it does a pretty incredible amount of damage to the brand.

Comment by ndiddy 3 minutes ago

> It also attracts a very specific type of person; everyone I personally worked with was very bright and capable.

How well did you and your colleagues do at math in high school?

Comment by cmdrk 59 minutes ago

can confirm, interviewing there was unpleasant and demanded a ridiculous amount of work before ever getting to talk to a human. There was a post on HN a little while back about someone who made it much further along in the process: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44149549

Made me happy I was cut loose early.

Comment by ethin 38 minutes ago

Yeah, I did try applying to them a year or so ago and got a lot of those questions too. The really weird thing to me (and what confuses me) is why exactly they want these questions? How exactly is someone supposed to share their "rationale or evidence for the high school performance selections above" when the "grades" for maths/native language is decided by the institution/teacher doing the grading and not by the student? And, even better: why exactly does Canonical need this information at all? I'm pretty sure that it's well-understood that your grades in high school (let alone college) say absolutely nothing about you today. And there are many, many, many reasons why someone in HS or college might perform poorly but in actuality they're brilliant and very capable.

Comment by atomicnumber3 25 minutes ago

Shuttleworth is rich and Ubuntu/Canonical is his personal feudal holding. They basically can do whatever dumb thing they want and none of it actually matters because they don't really need to respond to market forces.

I've worked for one of these businesses before - basically staffing a daycare running a very compelling roleplay scenario so a millionaire/billionaire has an excuse to get away from their family for 10 hours a day. It works best if you're a fresh grad college kid who doesn't realize any of that for a few years and is just glad to have gotten a job.

So, the actual intent of all of their hiring circus is to ensure they don't accidentally hire someone who realizes what's going on.

Comment by hmokiguess 1 hour ago

Can you share the backstory behind your gripe, this comment feels oddly specific to what appears unrelated to someone outside who doesn't know what you know. Makes me think there's some personal and deeper roots behind it

EDIT: I'm shocked.

Comment by ndiddy 4 minutes ago

It's because Canonical spams LinkedIn with tens of thousands of job posts (despite only having ~1800 employees) because they put ads for the same remote job listing in hundreds of different cities. As a result, basically anyone who's ever looked for a tech job on LinkedIn has at least looked at the first step of Canonical's job application process (including where it asks about how well you did at math in high school, your SAT scores, your college class ranking and GPA, etc).

Comment by shmel 1 hour ago

Not OP, but why is it unrelated? Hiring practices and salaries are very much related to staff working in a company. A lot of people just refuse to jump through the hoops when they have a choice where to work. People willing to do so will just go to FAANG to maximize TC. That leaves us with a more desperate and less qualified pool of candidates. I doubt many people dream about working in Canonical, it isn't Google from decades ago.

Comment by pluc 1 hour ago

It's pretty straightforward, go have a look at their careers site and application form. What parent is saying I believe is that they're leaving a lot of talent on the table because of questionable hiring practices; talent that would help proactively (or at least reactively) mitigate things like this.

Comment by woodruffw 20 minutes ago

I have no particular insight into Canonical's problems, but all large companies "ship their org chart" to some degree. Insofar as Canonical has abstruse hiring practices, it stands to reason that practical failures to perform adequate security responses are downstream of those practices.

Comment by nancyminusone 1 hour ago

I don't currently nor have ever even worked in the industry but have heard so many stories so often about this sort of thing it is now permanently associated whenever the name Canonical comes up.

Comment by AnotherGoodName 1 hour ago

Look it up so it isn't just coming from me. It's a quick Google "Canonical hiring process" and there's no shortage of wait wtf was that type of posts on this. You can also go on their website and try to apply for any job just to be further shocked.

They ask for; A massive multi-choice questionaire. A massive free form list of questions. An ask for an essay. Grades from High school through to University. That's to start the process of many rounds of interviews followed by finally an interview with Mark Shuttleworth himself who's known to say no on vibes.

Personally i applied for a senior management role after ~30years working at multiple other very large and well known companies. The pay at canonical was literally 1/5th but i was curious. I was honest about my high school scores and immediately given a thanks for your time but we will pass dialog on their website after stating maths scores in year 9. I'm not even fucking kidding. Obviously i was gobsmacked. It was a blessing to get knocked back that early all things considered.

Not my post but has more detail and matches what i saw. Be amazed at the insanity in the leadership at Canonical that allows for this; https://www.reddit.com/r/recruitinghell/comments/15kj845/can...

We're talking put him in a straightjacket loony tunes type of shit when it comes to Shuttleworth. You can also look up various personal interactions. It's utterly fucking insane.

Comment by matheusmoreira 32 minutes ago

> What sort of high school student were you?

What sort of answer are they looking for here?

Comment by actionfromafar 1 hour ago

You'd think space-faring South African billionaire would be Musk, but no.

Comment by alfanick 1 hour ago

It's common. I interviewed there years ago - full rebel, did not provide them my transcripts, grades etc. Last interview supposedly is run by Shuttleworth himself. Anyway, got a better gig meanwhile.

Comment by 31 minutes ago

Comment by bitfilped 1 hour ago

Just go interview there and you'll learn all about it for yourself.

Comment by dominotw 1 hour ago

Lol what an infuriating comment. "you must be butthurt from your interview"

Comment by AnotherGoodName 1 hour ago

To be fair i did get knocked back but not at all butthurt since it was at the very first stage on the application after filling in high school maths scores from ~40 years ago in a country that doesn't even have GPAs (so i have no idea what to even enter in that box).

The knockback didn't hurt. It just made me think Canonical was lead by a lunatic and a quick Google will confirm this.

Comment by qrtzka 33 minutes ago

Canonical is looking for bureaucrats, so at least they are honest in the hiring process. Look at the Canonical people on the Debian lists.

Comment by matheusmoreira 45 minutes ago

High school grades? That's pretty wild man.

Comment by BeetleB 1 hour ago

Reminds me of Epic (healthcare company). I was close to finishing grad school, and they wanted my SAT scores. When I gave it to them, they couldn't stop gushing. I wanted to wash my hands with a lot of soap at that point.

Comment by lotsofpulp 29 minutes ago

In the US, businesses ask for it because the SAT serves (or used to serve) as a decent proxy for IQ. A business cannot ask an applicant to take an intelligence aptitude test without a lot of extra cost to ensure the business complies with Griggs v. Duke Power Co (1971), so the cheaper workaround is to ask for SAT scores in conjunction with other proxies such as the school into which you were able to gain admission.

Comment by BeetleB 10 minutes ago

> In the US, businesses ask for it because the SAT serves (or used to serve) as a decent proxy for IQ. A business cannot ask an applicant to take an intelligence aptitude test without a lot of extra cost

Epic actually did (does?) administer a full blown "entrance exam" - generic problem solving skills, with some basic coding and math stuff. They literally arrange with the university to administer it in a classroom setting. So yeah, kind of like an aptitude test.

See https://pigment.is/blogs/blogs/epic-systems-skills-assessmen...

I actually don't mind that, as it ensures all applicants are being judged on a level field.

It's quite rare for people graduating with a BS to be quizzed about SAT scores - the focus tends to be more on GPA, etc. But asking for SAT scores when you've been in grad school for so long...? Kind of ridiculous. And if you are going to ask, might as well ask for the GRE scores instead.

They also did (do?) a full personality quiz. You know, the type where they give you a scenario, and say are you more of A or B, and you often find yourself to be neither or both...

Comment by theideaofcoffee 36 minutes ago

I just love that this is always one of the top comments when it comes to Canonical.

"Nah, let's not build up our technical street cred by doing stuff right, we'll torpedo that by making bizarre aspects of our culture stick in people's minds. Success!"

And just for full disclosure, I've never applied or have went through their process, all I know about it is second-hand through comments like these. It's just a terrible look to have that be what people think about your company.

Comment by tamimio 23 minutes ago

Haha, I remember years ago I did apply there but as soon as I saw the high school questions I just closed the page. Always pay attention to these red flags

Comment by cute_boi 47 minutes ago

Feels like India approach where they will ask high school certificates and every personal details like marriage, family history and things like that lol.

Comment by wannabe44 7 minutes ago

Indian corporate has problems but this doesn't seem to be true apart from standard background checks (a la HireRight).

Comment by _override 33 minutes ago

I wonder why they stop at high school grades. I don’t touch distros unless their engineers had perfect grades throughout elementary and middle school /s

Comment by throw0101c 57 minutes ago

As outlined in this weblog post:

* https://ubuntu.com/blog/fixes-available-in-proposed-pocket-f...

The fixes were in the "proposed" repo since October 26 (noble) and 28 (resolute):

* https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux

One could pull them down at any point in the last week. Yesterday afternoon they were still in "proposed", but I checked this morning (EST/UTC-5) and they there were in "updates". Some tracking of timeline of when the updates to the repos happened seems to be available at:

* https://ma.ttias.be/linux-cve-2026-98432-vulnerable-kernels/

The kernels goes through an QA testing processes, and per this September post, they're looking at shortening the timeframe for kernel updates:

* https://canonical.com/blog/accelerating-delivery-of-cve-fixe...

Comment by imjonse 15 minutes ago

Has there been a documented exploit of this CVE on Ubuntu or on the other distros before they were patched?

Comment by bon0r 1 hour ago

it's rolling out..

https://ma.ttias.be/linux-cve-2026-98432-vulnerable-kernels/

Comment by chrisvalleybay 1 hour ago

There has been a workaround available since nov 2: https://ubuntu.com/blog/fixes-available-in-proposed-pocket-f...

Comment by InsidiousWombat 1 hour ago

The fix is to install Debian

Comment by icedchai 27 minutes ago

Or build your own kernel from kernel.org and install that. I moved one of my Ubuntu dev boxes to 7.3.1.

Comment by 53 minutes ago

Comment by fodkodrasz 39 minutes ago

Maybe... IBM RHEL. Or Arch. Or NixOS. Or Fedora. Anything that doesn't ship apt.

Comment by tlamponi 23 minutes ago

They all had flaws and holes in their package manager in the past, or how are they magically 100% secure?

Comment by throw0101c 52 minutes ago

> since nov 2

Since October 26 (noble) and 28 (resolute), when the kernel versions in question hit "proposed". November 2 is just the weblog post, but the solution was available the week before.

Comment by adsfasf 1 hour ago

Aren't the patches out since a day?

Comment by guyisit 1 hour ago

Holy crap, they are showing in apt… why in the world wouldn’t they update the dang CVE page?!

I agree though, this took too long.

Comment by khoury 39 minutes ago

Thank you for this! Finally patched

Comment by slekker 1 hour ago

Likely needs a human from another department to press a button, and they have not "synced" with the team publishing the patch.

Comment by chasd00 1 hour ago

They need to "stack hands" and "gain alignment". ( i work in consulting :P )

Comment by ravenstine 47 minutes ago

I was asking "what in the world is taking Ubuntu so long" back in 2006.

Comment by nekusar 7 minutes ago

Maybe the patch is going through their interview process?

Comment by ChrisArchitect 1 hour ago

Discussion:

WTF Ubuntu?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50337608

Comment by infamouscow 1 hour ago

This is a problem with LTS distro kernels in general. You're trading the feeling of stability at the kernel level for security updates.

Comment by layer8 1 hour ago

This is not a problem with Debian LTS, you’re getting timely security updates. Debian fixed this vulnerability three weeks ago within two days: https://www.debian.org/lts/security/