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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Sounds like they do when they get the chance. I've worked for a company that didn't have quite as crazy a hiring process but they had the same basic profile - very good at hiring for potential in juniors, but underpaid for the ability they wanted. As a result they really struggle to hire seniors and are often a stepping stone to a better paid position. They do manage to keep some people until retirement, though (a very bimodal distribution - generally either brilliant but don't care to work anywhere else, or utterly useless and can't get a job anywhere else)
Feels like India approach where they will ask high school certificates and every personal details like marriage, family history and things like that lol.
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.
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).
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/
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).
To the extent that you've made specific claims, they are false. It's hard to argue with vague claims about tangentially fixing a security issue but at any rate just looking over LTS releases, they absolutely and frequently do backport security issues to LTS releases. They don't do it for every security issue, but the idea that they rarely do it or only do it as part of a tangential change is once again... categorically false.
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.
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:
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?
> So that people can reboot their production systems two days apart?
A lot of people don't reboot their systems. They build new ones, shift workloads and traffic over, and decommission the old ones. I can do that multiple times a day if required with no disruption of services.
You don't have to stay patched if you judge the risk doesn't make it worth it, but Ubuntu is pretty much the only distro that made the choice for you.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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)
I am someone who believes ALL Linux distros are basically the same (with outliers like Nix) but on the other hand Ubuntu does use some things like it's own network manager that is not the same as Debian as far as I know. And it has a working remote upgrade functionality which I used just yesterday. On Debian the process is manual and is not recommender to actually do.
> What are the tradeoffs? (other than faster patching on Debian of course)
Older packages, but that's one of the reasons I use it. On the stable branch you will only get security fixes and very rarely updates for critical bugs.
If you need to use newer packages the testing branch is surprisingly stable (it is the base for Ubuntu) but there are a lot of updates.
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.
That is a wild take, especially consider the GP asked for a server use-case. Do you just assume that all new versions should be taken as soon as possible for all packages?
There is a balance: too outdated is bad, too eager for new versions is bad. The tradeoff that LTS tries to take is older, proven versions but with relevant security fixes quickly.
Not a wild take at all. Most server use cases already use containers to precisely specify what the server workload depends on, and can only access what's in the container. I see no reason for the base system to move slowly with proven versions. Even if you don't use containers, you most likely already use language-specific tools to lock in your dependencies. Leave these to the app developers and the sysadmin can move at any speed.
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.
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
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.
I installed their -proposed pocket kernel, then some tools on my machine broke so I installed arch with gnome and it's business as usual...
Back when I used arch last they didn't have `archinstall` which made it just as easy as anything else to configure. Arch wiki is still a great resource. Wasted a lot of time trying out desktops just to land back at gnome. Genuinely can't believe how bad Cosmic DE is after all this time. I should be nicer about that, but I'm willing to elaborate if anyone from Pop is here, no ill will.
I have a... potentially false sense of security now that I'm on a distribution that can keep up with all of this CVS madness. I wonder if it's not just the best way to do it going forward. We'll see, it could be so if things go the way Greg Kroah-Hartman supposes they will; that LLMs are just like when fuzzers were new, and the issues will gradually reduce over time.
I've always wondered what is going on with Ubuntu. Right now, after the ICC rug pull, Europe is interested in an OS not controlled by the USA. Canonical should go all-in on an opportunity like this.
But even basic company tooling like Landscape is not doing great (Oh, look, all your machines are not fully patched 5 minutes after we released a patch. Sound the alarms)
Meanwhile, they spend a lot of effort on things that ultimately not gain traction. Upstart or snap might be technically OK, but socially they are dead ends. Half baked Rust coreutils in an LTS? Who asked for that?
I've seen multiple major CVEs and showstopper bugs just sit there, while Debian and Red Hat move weeks faster than them, and other individuals and big companies providing ppas with workarounds.
I like the company, but some major bigwigs over there need to wake up.
adsfasf | a day ago
guyisit | a day ago
I agree though, this took too long.
slekker | a day ago
chasd00 | 23 hours ago
khoury | 23 hours ago
AnotherGoodName | a day ago
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.
hmokiguess | a day ago
EDIT: I'm shocked.
pluc | a day ago
AnotherGoodName | a day ago
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.
actionfromafar | 23 hours ago
matheusmoreira | 23 hours ago
What sort of answer are they looking for here?
aidenn0 | 21 hours ago
warkdarrior | 20 hours ago
alfanick | a day ago
bitfilped | a day ago
shmel | a day ago
dominotw | 23 hours ago
AnotherGoodName | 23 hours ago
The knockback didn't hurt. It just made me think Canonical was lead by a lunatic and a quick Google will confirm this.
FireBeyond | 21 hours ago
nancyminusone | 23 hours ago
woodruffw | 23 hours ago
ndiddy | 22 hours ago
BeetleB | 23 hours ago
lotsofpulp | 23 hours ago
BeetleB | 22 hours ago
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...
tptacek | 21 hours ago
The reason more companies don't use IQ tests is that they don't work well for candidate qualification. Also, candidates hate them.
lotsofpulp | 17 hours ago
cmdrk | 23 hours ago
Made me happy I was cut loose early.
ethin | 23 hours ago
atomicnumber3 | 23 hours ago
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.
93po | 19 hours ago
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.
ethin | 18 hours ago
93po | 18 hours ago
Hasz | 23 hours ago
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.
ndiddy | 22 hours ago
How well did you and your colleagues do at math in high school?
queenkjuul | 19 hours ago
nish__ | 22 hours ago
throwaway27448 | 22 hours ago
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.
throw-the-towel | 22 hours ago
> 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.
rcxdude | 15 hours ago
Sounds like they do when they get the chance. I've worked for a company that didn't have quite as crazy a hiring process but they had the same basic profile - very good at hiring for potential in juniors, but underpaid for the ability they wanted. As a result they really struggle to hire seniors and are often a stepping stone to a better paid position. They do manage to keep some people until retirement, though (a very bimodal distribution - generally either brilliant but don't care to work anywhere else, or utterly useless and can't get a job anywhere else)
cute_boi | 23 hours ago
wannabe44 | 22 hours ago
matheusmoreira | 23 hours ago
AnotherGoodName | 19 hours ago
theideaofcoffee | 23 hours ago
"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.
qrtzka | 23 hours ago
_override | 23 hours ago
tamimio | 23 hours ago
FireBeyond | 21 hours ago
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).
infamouscow | a day ago
layer8 | 23 hours ago
vanschelven | 23 hours ago
mxey | 22 hours ago
Maxatar | 21 hours ago
infamouscow | 20 hours ago
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).
Maxatar | 14 hours ago
queenkjuul | 19 hours ago
Maxatar | 14 hours ago
43: https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2026-bc7bd292...
44: https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2026-7b153c4c...
Fedora 45 was only just recently release and Fedora 42 and earlier will never get an official patch since those are no longer maintained.
chrisvalleybay | a day ago
InsidiousWombat | 23 hours ago
fodkodrasz | 23 hours ago
tlamponi | 23 hours ago
icedchai | 23 hours ago
throw0101c | 23 hours ago
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.
ChrisArchitect | 23 hours ago
WTF Ubuntu?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50337608
bon0r | 23 hours ago
https://ma.ttias.be/linux-cve-2026-98432-vulnerable-kernels/
throw0101c | 23 hours ago
* 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...
gwbas1c | 19 hours ago
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."
throw0101c | 18 hours ago
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
cassianoleal | 17 hours ago
throw0101c | 17 hours ago
reverius42 | 16 hours ago
mjhay | 16 hours ago
fauchletenerum | 11 hours ago
eptcyka | 9 hours ago
cassianoleal | 4 hours ago
A lot of people don't reboot their systems. They build new ones, shift workloads and traffic over, and decommission the old ones. I can do that multiple times a day if required with no disruption of services.
You don't have to stay patched if you judge the risk doesn't make it worth it, but Ubuntu is pretty much the only distro that made the choice for you.
ravenstine | 23 hours ago
tosti | 19 hours ago
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.
imjonse | 22 hours ago
wtch98 | 22 hours ago
talon8635 | 22 hours ago
1over137 | 11 hours ago
fwlr | 9 hours ago
wredcoll | 20 hours ago
cromka | 16 hours ago
arto | 20 hours ago
vdfs | 15 hours ago
nekusar | 22 hours ago
marcosdumay | 22 hours ago
You are expecting some quality that was never there. Visibly so.
warkdarrior | 20 hours ago
Scaled | 19 hours ago
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.
Sephr | 19 hours ago
VCFundedGenYer | 16 hours ago
At least 15 years of nonsense.
lp92 | 11 hours ago
worksonmine | 4 hours ago
unrented7977 | an hour ago
xandrius | 19 hours ago
VCFundedGenYer | 16 hours ago
Ubuntu should be your last choice.
machska | 22 hours ago
bakugo | 22 hours ago
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.
queenkjuul | 19 hours ago
atestu | 22 hours ago
esikich | 22 hours ago
sgc | 22 hours ago
tasuki | 19 hours ago
sgc | 15 hours ago
cantalopes | 22 hours ago
1over137 | 22 hours ago
mad182 | 21 hours ago
qwerpy | 21 hours ago
People are saying Debian. What are the tradeoffs? (other than faster patching on Debian of course)
esikich | 21 hours ago
dizhn | 9 hours ago
worksonmine | 4 hours ago
Older packages, but that's one of the reasons I use it. On the stable branch you will only get security fixes and very rarely updates for critical bugs.
If you need to use newer packages the testing branch is surprisingly stable (it is the base for Ubuntu) but there are a lot of updates.
mhitza | 21 hours ago
kccqzy | 21 hours ago
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.
SahAssar | 15 hours ago
There is a balance: too outdated is bad, too eager for new versions is bad. The tradeoff that LTS tries to take is older, proven versions but with relevant security fixes quickly.
kccqzy | 14 hours ago
1over137 | 12 hours ago
This doesn't seem to be popular with linux though. It's one thing I like about FreeBSD, everything is easy to keep very bleeding edge.
Maybe Debian 'testing'?, is that commonly run in prod?
jolmg | 10 hours ago
> This doesn't seem to be popular with linux though.
Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.
Nobody ever got fired for choosing Java.
Nobody ever got fired for choosing Debian.
It's a bandwagon effect. Though, it can also be a matter of common familiarity if you're not the only admin.
nevon | 20 hours ago
opengrass | 20 hours ago
_mpn_ | 20 hours ago
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.
bpavuk | 19 hours ago
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
queenkjuul | 19 hours ago
OJFord | 19 hours ago
Zopieux | 6 hours ago
unrented7977 | an hour ago
Well, I do use Arch on a lot of my VMs but still.
xet7 | 22 hours ago
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
lousken | 20 hours ago
dennysora-main | 18 hours ago
VCFundedGenYer | 16 hours ago
If you rely on Ubuntu, move to Debian.
leecommamichael | 9 hours ago
Back when I used arch last they didn't have `archinstall` which made it just as easy as anything else to configure. Arch wiki is still a great resource. Wasted a lot of time trying out desktops just to land back at gnome. Genuinely can't believe how bad Cosmic DE is after all this time. I should be nicer about that, but I'm willing to elaborate if anyone from Pop is here, no ill will.
I have a... potentially false sense of security now that I'm on a distribution that can keep up with all of this CVS madness. I wonder if it's not just the best way to do it going forward. We'll see, it could be so if things go the way Greg Kroah-Hartman supposes they will; that LLMs are just like when fuzzers were new, and the issues will gradually reduce over time.
hyperman1 | 6 hours ago
But even basic company tooling like Landscape is not doing great (Oh, look, all your machines are not fully patched 5 minutes after we released a patch. Sound the alarms)
Meanwhile, they spend a lot of effort on things that ultimately not gain traction. Upstart or snap might be technically OK, but socially they are dead ends. Half baked Rust coreutils in an LTS? Who asked for that?
I've seen multiple major CVEs and showstopper bugs just sit there, while Debian and Red Hat move weeks faster than them, and other individuals and big companies providing ppas with workarounds.
I like the company, but some major bigwigs over there need to wake up.
pydevgo | 5 hours ago