Occasionally, some program or process hiccups and dies a horrible death. When this happens a dialog is thrown informing the user of this unfortunate event. On my new Ubuntu MATE 24.10 laptop, the Bluetooth Manager (blueman) keeps burping, but for some reason continues to function. At least to a degree (I won't go into the vagaries of Bluetooth here).
Recently, on a couple of Macs I own, I'm seeing a variety of issues. The one I'm typing on now has a tendency -- growing in frequency -- of my wi-fi going haywire. When it does, I'm forced to reboot. I've run the Apple Network Diagnostics program, which always reports a DNS failure. But I've changed my DNS settings, booted into safe mode, rebooted my router, flushed my DNS cache and pretty much tried everything I've read online. To no avail.
Apple Support is totally useless. I've sent the diagnostic reports, queried the Apple support community, and other Mac sources. No one has a remedy.
In fact, no one has ever responded to a crash report or "official" support query. So, what's the purpose of generating and submitting these reports? No one responds, and no one fixes the problem. It seems they are useless black holes meant to make the user they are doing something.
My guess is it's to make users not feel as useless/helpless with the problems they don't comprehend/understand since a large part of Mac users just expect things to work and if it doesn't to be fixed ASAP since they already sunk so much money into the device they expect "premium" customer care - so reporting the issue or at least making it "seem to be reported" gives the user a sense of accomplishment even if it is just a shallow one
Because if you clicked on it and it says "We acknowledge your report" or something as vague as that it gives the user an illusion of "Hey they do care it will be fixed, money well spent" - and sometimes the user waits for a few months and no update ever comes to fix it but they learn to live with the bug (if it isn't OS breaking bug it stops being annoying when you consider the money to buy a brand new on-brand device so they "deal with it") - that is my take on it
On the bright side - when I read errors in terminal from Ubuntu MATE I ether:
a) google the bits and peaces one at a time to search the internet/forums of similar problems
b) copy the whole error page and paste it to ChatGPT and then go and google the things AI tells might be the issue (since you can't trust all the commands it tells you will work anyways - always double check the AI)
c) call a friend that knows a bit more tech than I do and ask for advice if a) nor b) work out
All in all - I think Linux as an OS incentivizes users to read and learn the errors and guides you into DIY ethics of fixing things and empowering yourself whilst other greedy options deliberately obfuscate the means of finding solutions by ourselves and push you to buy new stuff
Yeah, no. I mentioned the blueman crash that occurs every time I boot my computer. It offers to send a crash report. OK, I did that. But send it to whom? And is there really someone at the "other end" who's going to read it? There's never a confirmation, as you indicated. In my opinion, these either are sent to /dev/null or some similar black hole.
In Ubuntu, the bug reports sent from apport end up at https://errors.ubuntu.com/. The wiki page (particularly the Rationale section) may answer your question:
As far as I know and understand industrial practice in software development, such crash reports are not intended to be converted into support tickets on one-to-one basis. They land in a database which is used for gathering statistics. 'Marginal' cases are thrown away. Most common errors provide a body of cases to be inspected and possibly to be deemed important enough to be investigated and patched.
Apport sure does something.
Sometimes after a crash of an app, a report is created, which I can choose to send and then launchpad.net is opened with the report already filled in.
Again, it sometimes happens and sometimes not so I guess apport ignores duplicate bugs.
Well, thanks to everyone who responded. I was actually posting more in frustration than anything else. It does seem that crash reports fall into a black hole, but it seems like something of a useless exercise, as nothing (correction) seems to come of it.
Having been a software developer years back, I realize that unit testing and systems testing is part of the process. At the same time, I understand that not every individual condition will be able to be covered.
I'm having an interesting time with an AI trying to debug my DNS issues. It only occurs on one Mac in my environment, so the problem is almost 100% likely there's a software conflict or a preference corruption of some sort. The AI has suggested some things I hadn't known existed "under the covers" of macOS. For example,
networkQuality is a command-line operation that shows, unsurprisingly, how consistent the network connection is. system_profiler SPNetworkDataType gets details about the wi-dfi connection log stream --predicate 'subsystem == "com.apple.wifi"' --info keeping this running should show interruptions of the network if they occur
There are others, that exist on other systems (ifconfig, for example), but I give thumbs up to the AI, as it's as patient as can be, doesn't tell me the thread is closed, old, or repetitive, and persists between reboots.
Crash reports are usually meaningless to me, but the AI is actually trying to help.