Calling this a "slip-up" is an outrageous downplay. If anything this makes me suspicious of the moderator who posted the comment too. One does not accidentally prepare a zip file with a malicious exe and xubuntu-specific language, upload it to a server, and point a torrent link at it.
You're making an assumption that this moderator is anything more than a Xubuntu enthusiast who wants to downplay outrage on Reddit. Keep in mind Xubuntu is mostly a community effort, not a large corporation with seniors who know how to handle this "best".
Start by googling the username of the account. They are the Xubuntu Marketing and Website lead. This is the domain they are responsible for and, given their long history, they should know better.
This sort of thing must risk harming Canonical's reputation, so you'd think they'd want to use whatever leverage they have to enforce better practices.
1. https://ubuntu.com/desktop/flavors
2. https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=xubuntu-desktop
Which is to say, I'm fairly sure that they're still just a volunteer community member.
which is why the whole distro zoo and "stick it to the man" theatre has always been a nightmare. Running some barely maintained operating system that is an nth-degree spin-off is like buying a pacemaker from craigslist. The people who go "I don't trust Canonical/Google" and then go download some binary blob browser fork/OS uploaded by an anonymous guy from the internet is way too large.
The real obnoxiousness is that Ubuntu doesn't keep these desktop and otherwise specialized variants partially in-house like they once did. It isn't like they don't have the money or the staff. It's just not part of their world takeover plan anymore; no deviation allowed.
Just get away from Ubuntu, install Debian, and choose XFCE when installing. Please.
That's because they don't have a world takeover plan anymore. That plan failed, so they came up with other ones (mobile! Subscriptions!) and those failed too - so now they're just trying to survive.
I honestly prefer for Ubuntu to be just another Linux player doing what most Linux players do (i.e. looking after n.1 and focusing on internal consistency), rather than their original borg-like form that tried to co-opt the entire ecosystem. As much as I enjoy a reliable Debian-like infrastructure everywhere, there is value in the fundamental diversity of distros focused on different ways to "do Linux".
If my options are between a barely maintained linux operating system which might compromise my data and a barely maintained windows operating system that is designed to compromise my data I'll take my chances with linux. At this point no one can be assured of their safety and all anyone can do is choose the lesser evil and hope for the best.
You're saying this literally a few days after Microsoft pushed out a Win11 update that broke localhost.
Oh, and that update - fairly sure it was optional.
The usual lesson applies, never install version 1.0. Install 1.0.5 or even better, 1.1.1.
Looking at the intentional degradation since Win7, I'd call it a "barely and maliciously maintained operating system".
But I have to use another MS product daily: Teams. It's a product with very poor usability. Even simple things like tracking which message you have read and which one you haven't don't get better upgrade after upgrade. I am sure they have a huge development budget and tons of paid developers. The number of paid developers can be completely uncorrelated to quality.
(I am sure zulip has just a little fraction of paid developers, but it is a program in the same domain that works muuuch better.)
Indeed that is a suspicious or at least untrustworthy way to deflect the seriousness of a malware infection that potentially affects all users of an OS distribution.
How do you prove that the person hacking the website is not an associate of (or the same as) the person running the website?
If this were proprietary software then the software would be expected to die. Since this is open source, there is the option for the original project to die and for a fork to rise form the ashes.