Ask HN: What in the world is taking Ubuntu so long?
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.
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...
> The kernels goes through an QA testing processes, and per this September post, they're looking at shortening the timeframe for kernel updates:
Looks like they aren't flexible enough to get a 4-line fix out the door when they need to.
These situations need a CEO or other high up to pull some people into a room, and basically say, "this needs to be released by EOD."
> Looks like they aren't flexible enough to get a 4-line fix out the door when they need to.
Perhaps because Ubuntu, like most distros, release new kernels that include fixes and updates for more than one issue:
* https://access.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2026:93413
* https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/6.8.0-149.149
* https://www.suse.com/support/update/announcement/2026/suse-s...
* https://security-tracker.debian.org/tracker/DSA-6568-1
Perhaps that's the problem? Surely they use a version control system that allows them to branch off of older commit for these kinds of urgent patches.
So distros should release a new kernel for each CVE? Or only the "important" CVEs? And if two "important" ones come out two days apart there should be two kernels running through the QA pipeline? So that people can reboot their production systems two days apart?
Has there been a documented exploit of this CVE on Ubuntu or on the other distros before they were patched?
I haven't had a documented packet with IPOptions arrive on any of my firewalls, the packets are typically dropped, so exploiting remotely is going to be very difficult. In theory you could use another exploit and then lateral move in some networks which don't drop them at a router level.
Here’s the real answer. It’s not as scary as the original reporters made it out to be.
Yeah, had this ever actually been proven in the "real world"?
See here: https://x.com/mattiasgeniar/status/2118040483154755627
You were wrong to have confidence in Ubuntu before this, you are doubly wrong for it to still be "shaking your confidence".
You are expecting some quality that was never there. Visibly so.
Do you have any evidence for why confidence in Ubuntu was misplaced before this? Or are you just vibe-accusing?
Best example I can think of is when they shipped an update that they knew would cause corruption on ZFS disks and didn't warn people sufficiently to not update if they were using ZFS. (A warning was buried in the release notes, but such a serious issue should have held back release. Most normal people don't read fifty pages of docs before each update.)
I don't hate Ubuntu at all, but that incident showed a level of blithe carelessness to user data that is unacceptable and reduced my confidence in them.
They closed feature requests to add secure ISO downloads instead of figuring out how to secure their ISO downloads
I'd love to try your open-source OS for my server next.
Seems like a good time to ask: what do people use, if not ubuntu, on a web server? Like for example for a rails app, on EC2... asking for a friend (who is me).
I switched back to Debian.
Me too
Me three. I was surprised how same it all was. Except for the snaps! Debian doesn't force you to use snaps. This was perhaps the top reason I switched.
I think debian is a polular choice
FreeBSD
I personally use Debian both on my servers and desktops, for the last 15 years or so.
Ubuntu has been the easy default for things like WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) for my coding on Windows, and a linux VM on my home server. But I don't really like the idea of having a distro that doesn't treat security patching with urgency in the age of AI-fueled exploits. Need a standard distro with decent hardware support, low churn, and fast patching.
People are saying Debian. What are the tradeoffs? (other than faster patching on Debian of course)
Nothing really. Ubuntu is just a wrapper around Debian. If you are familiar with Ubuntu, it's basically exactly the same.
Rocky Linux. But I've built my career working with RHEL-compatible/derivative distros like CentOS, Fedora.
In the age of AI, there are only more and more security vulnerabilities to be discovered, and backporting all of them to outdated kernels will be nigh impossible. I’d not rather make such security patches dependent on the timeliness of backports especially if it is done by a distro rather than upstream. I suggest you use a rolling distro rather than anything with LTS kernels. The CVE in the original post CVE-2026-98432 is fixed since 7.3. If a distro doesn’t offer kernel 7.3.1 today, rule it out. (7.3.3 is also out today.)
In general I find distros using old kernels annoying because Linus treats compatibility seriously and “don’t break use space” has been a mantra for many years. On desktops in particular, GPU driver improvements like https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.3-DRM make it super worthwhile.
As for exactly which distro, it matters less than you think. I use openSUSE Tumbleweed but plenty of my friends prefer Arch.
Amazon Linux (2023, or 2027 once it's out of preview).
Devuan, it's debian without systemd. Other light picks are Alpine or dietpi. Want to get into vm's, FreeBSD for it's bhyve hypervisor.
I use Rocky Linux on my web servers and hypervisors.
However, since I run a VPS host most of my customers run Debian or Ubuntu, due to both being more approachable than RPM-based distros.
I'm not a huge Ubuntu fan due to it being a very heavy downstream of Debian, versus Rocky which is 99.9% RHEL. I hold no grudge against Ubuntu, they made desktop Linux very approachable when Mandriva, Knoppix, et al. weren't.
But Canonical is too much of a downstream versus Red Hat, constantly losing standards wars. And unlike BSD (where I can understand) Canonical is a downstream by choice. It's like Sony who keeps losing standards wars to rivals.
Even in my homelab EVE-NG runs on Ubuntu.
for personal use I'd go with NixOS. NixOS "Unstable" is both pretty reliable and receives latest feature updates a lot faster than stable branches. Nix is simply the fastest to iterate with, for me personally, and having a VM or a Docker image declared right in my flake is something I love.
for something more serious than a personal project, I'd go with Debian because of their vast free support windows and some incredible companies providing extended support
I still just use Ubuntu honestly
Honestly Ubuntu doesn't even come to mind as a candidate... Alpine, debian, nix, distroless, scratch, Amazon Linux, coreos are what come immediately to mind that I'd expect to see.
According to Canonical product team, fixed Ubuntu kernel is at proposed:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50348688
Or install newest mainline test kernel, but it had less testing, YMMV:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50358616
Aren't the patches out since a day?
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.
Likely needs a human from another department to press a button, and they have not "synced" with the team publishing the patch.
They need to "stack hands" and "gain alignment". ( i work in consulting :P )
Thank you for this! Finally patched
it's rolling out..
https://ma.ttias.be/linux-cve-2026-98432-vulnerable-kernels/
Discussion:
WTF Ubuntu?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50337608
This is a problem with LTS distro kernels in general. You're trading the feeling of stability at the kernel level for security updates.
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/
For Ubuntu it was _all_ their kernels though...
LTS distros can track the LTS kernels and they’ve all been updated
Ubuntu is the only Linux distro with an LTS release that has not patched this issue, so saying this is a problem with LTS distro kernels in general is categorically false.
A large number of security issues are not backported to stable or LTS kernels.
A patch containing a new feature which tangentially fixes a security issue is merged to mainline. It will not get merged into stable or LTS (by definition).
Fedora took over two weeks to get a patch out too afaik
There has been a workaround available since nov 2: https://ubuntu.com/blog/fixes-available-in-proposed-pocket-f...
The fix is to install Debian
Maybe... IBM RHEL. Or Arch. Or NixOS. Or Fedora. Anything that doesn't ship apt.
They all had flaws and holes in their package manager in the past, or how are they magically 100% secure?
Or build your own kernel from kernel.org and install that. I moved one of my Ubuntu dev boxes to 7.3.1.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You'd think space-faring South African billionaire would be Musk, but no.
> What sort of high school student were you?
What sort of answer are they looking for here?
"Top 10% of my class"
"Sorry, we only hire from the top 0.001%."
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.
Just go interview there and you'll learn all about it for yourself.
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.
Lol what an infuriating comment. "you must be butthurt from your interview"
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.
Hah, yes, see my comment elsewhere - it broke my recruiter's brain when I said I didn't have any Year 9 or Year 10 grades to enter, but had graduated high school.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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...
Businesses can and do ask applicants to take general cognitive tests, without excess compliance costs. IQ testing is presumptively legitimate for essentially all white collar jobs. The biggest companies that administer these tests for hiring companies have logo crawls that include a few of the best known companies in the world.
The reason more companies don't use IQ tests is that they don't work well for candidate qualification. Also, candidates hate them.
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.
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.
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.
I think regardless of the school and instructor's difficulty, there's a group of people who basically make perfect grades in STEM topics (or all topics) regardless of those variables. And for some people it's easy to know what their grades were 20-30 years ago because their experience was "I made effectively perfect grades at everything my entire school career" and will vividly remember the couple exceptions. I didn't pride myself on my grades and it wasn't encouraged at all by my parents or peer group, but I was one of those students, and have the experience of remembering exactly the one class I got a B in (photo journalism, the teacher hated me). I don't say this to brag, this account isn't tied to my name, but more just explaining what Canonical is perhaps looking for.
I do think there is a large connection between grade performance/SAT scores and general aptitude and success later in life. But as you said there are plenty of circumstances that would lead to poor grades that aren't related to ability - but I would also say those circumstances are also possible indicators of how good of an employee you will be. For example having behavioral problems as a kid could lead to bad grades despite otherwise capable of good grades, and I would suspect there's connection between childhood behavioral problems and conduct as an adult.
I can't really agree with this. Even if we consider only college grades and not HS ones, the wider the gap between your university days and you today is, the less representative those grades are. I think this is especially relevant for the high school scenario though: even if your the perfect student, your HS days might be 10-12 years behind you and your probably a completely different person today factoring in life experiences and all that. Like I just struggle to see how grades (or, really, any academic performance information in general) says anything about the you who is applying for a job unless your like a year fresh out of college and applying to an internship or something.
nothing about the things higher education or employers look at is a perfect signal of what they want from employees. you have to try to use available data as best you can, and it's hard to find something more reliable than past results, regardless of how old those results are. obviously more recent results should be weighed more. but old results don't mean nothing.
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.
> 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?
Well if they work at canonical we know they did very well
If they're so bright and capable why can't they patch their OS?
> It also attracts a very specific type of person; everyone I personally worked with was very bright and capable.
I don't know anyone at canonical personally, so I have no specific opinion. However. This smells like the same bullshit peddled by any tech company's hiring policy but executed less competently.
I wonder why these bright abd capable people didn't join a company that actually pays reasonably.
> Salaries are not US-tech competitive, but absolutely are Central/South America and Europe competitive.
Don't their salary bands change between countries? They're offering 55k-ish to a Senior SWE in France, which is a low-ball offer even there.
Feels like India approach where they will ask high school certificates and every personal details like marriage, family history and things like that lol.
Indian corporate has problems but this doesn't seem to be true apart from standard background checks (a la HireRight).
High school grades? That's pretty wild man.
Not the worst part. I didn’t even reach the stage of multiple psychometric tests others report.
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.
Canonical is looking for bureaucrats, so at least they are honest in the hiring process. Look at the Canonical people on the Debian lists.
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
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
And yet, despite that, their recruiter brains break on things that it feels like they're selecting for.
In high school (in Australia), I went to Year 7 and 8 at one school, and did not do well (ADHD+"gifted"), and spent most of my time, it felt, in detentions, etc.
Moved to another school. Half a term of Year 9 and I was in 10. By the second week of second term I was in Year 11, and went on from there, graduating effectively 2 years early.
Canonical recruiter: "So you don't have any Year 9 grades to share? Or Year 10? Hmm, I'm not sure how we handle that, as we want to know those."
"Amusingly", when I went to do paramedic studies at a Community College in the US, high school graduation was required. Because my high school was overseas, they had to use a "translation service" to validate that my Australian high school graduation was "educationally equivalent" to the US. Never mind that whether or not it was (and I'd argue it was superior), "What about the fact that I have a B.S. (Hons)?". "Sorry, School of Health rules says we need this document for admission". (I got in, but the delays meant I had to wait until the next intake).
Maybe the patch is going through their interview process?
I was asking "what in the world is taking Ubuntu so long" back in 2006.
Yeah, sorry. That was when the first LTS was delayed by 2 months. I don't recall that ever happening again these past 2 decades.
The good thing was a LOT of bugs were fixed in those 2 months. Also you can install or upgrade to U+1, so you could've upgraded in april.
I now rely on AI to fix them, otherwise I simply can't wait for them to release updates.
Does Ubuntu Pro get this fix any sooner, or is it the same for everyone?
My understanding is that everyone gets this at the same time.
Ubuntu Pro provides security updates for packages that wouldn't otherwise be supported by Canonical at a given point in time. If your version of Ubuntu is still within the (non-extended) support period, kernel security updates are always provided regardless of Pro.
Pro only gives you longer support periods, not extra support during the normal support period. That and livepatch and some other things i forget. But all updates within the normal support timeframe for a given release are the same with or without pro.
Why is anyone surprised about this? Ubuntu had a shitty track record of critical vulns for a long time, seeing so many in Wazuh was fun.