Newbie thoughts

I’ve had Mate 16.10 running now for about 5 days. Tweaking and playing around to get a feel for things, BTW I’ve come from Mint 18 cinnamon, and so far I’m really happy with Ubuntu Mate 16.10. Thank you to Wimpy and everyone else that’s put all the effort into this Distro. Every so often I get these popups with a message about something has crashed and if I would like to send a report. It’s funny that the only way I know something has crashed is because of the message. I promptly send the information thinking this will assist the developers. So is this correct? I’m not a programmer, just a user, and hope that by sending the requested messages that I’m contributing something back. Next question, is there other ways to contribute back to the community? My daily driver has been Linux for the past 3 yrs and feels that I need to give back. Previously I’ve contributed monetarily to Mint (which I’ll do here) but would also like to do other things.
The current computer that I’m on is a lenovo ThinkPad T530 i5-3320M 2.6 GHz, with 16 GB memory, 250 GB SSD and another 500 GB storage, Nvidia 5400M. Everything works right out of the box including the intel wireless from suspend mode. In general, I’m blown away how everything JUST works!
Thanks again to the development team, and look forward to learning more as time moves on. (hope this wasn’t too long)

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Hi and welcome

Yes, it sends useful information such as the stack trace.
(the stack of function calls leading up to a crash)

You can contribute bug reports on top of those you’re sending when a program crashes.
(Not all bugs lead to crashes)
Bugs can be filed on lauchpad: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-mate
Bugs can also be filed against individual MATE components as issues on github: https://github.com/mate-desktop or for Ubuntu MATE components on bitbucket: https://bitbucket.org/ubuntu-mate/

You can contribute by helping fellow users on this forums or IRC (btw, that’s a great way to learn too)

Also one of the easy things you can do is share your exact system specs on this thread:

2 Likes

You can also allow other programs to send information to their developers. E.G. Firefox.