We’re all getting these error messages from time to time, the usual “Sorry, Ubuntu 2x.xx has experienced an internal error. Send problem report to the developers?”
When we click on “Send”, are these actually sent to developers? Or should we report these crashes ourselves?
I’ve always wondered wheter these reports reach their destination or not. Or we should take action and do it ourselves.
Yes, particularly if a number of reports relating to the same error get reported by numerous end-users, as the error tracker detects patterns & when the same/similar report(s) exceed certain trigger levels extra notifications go out drawing attention to a problem needing a priority fix.
I'm not a developer, but I do note some of these extra reports hitting my inbox, and have seen the resulting attention they can achieve.
Of course, not all will get focused attention, currently I'd expect most attention would go towards questing or the recent 25.10 release, as every fix there (esp. if related to say the 6.17 kernel & its kernel modules; aka drivers) may prevent problems when that kernel stack gets back-ported to noble (ie. 24.04.4 in a few months), yet in comparison some older bugs for jammy (22.04) may not get much attention (exceptions maybe if a newer bugfix has issues, but as that release is so old; backported fixes shouldn't cause issues there given the HWE stack hasn't had changes in some time).
Yes they are useful, and whilst a single report on an older release may not get a developers attention; if many many people report that issue that it will be noticed (numbers of reports impact how where the limited time available for bug fixing gets allocated)
I almost always elect to send these reports as I see no harm in it. But this case made me think about what really happens.
The details of the report posted by @ClaudioDC reveal that it was the Brisk menu that crashed, not Ubuntu proper. Unless I'm mistaken, Brisk menu isn't developed or maintained by either Canonical or Gnome, but by MATE. Does Canonical forward such reports to MATE DE developers? If not, ... ?
Thank you very much @tkn@ugnvs & @guiverc ! I did search yesterday before posting, but those threads didn’t show up, somehow the forum software decided they were not relevant enough for my query
Good question. I do see those error reports at errors.ubuntu.com but don’t know about the next step. Oddly enough, a few minutes ago I found this Youtube video by @Wimpy himself calling Brisk Menu “the biggest crasher in the history of Ubuntu MATE” - I will watch later.
- I will watch later.