Disabling whoopsie by default in the 12.04.1 release

[Jeremy Bicha]

On 2 August 2012 17:31, Sebastien Bacher <seb128 at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> What do people think about turning whoopsie off for 12.04.1?

I strongly support turning off the error message pop-ups for Ubuntu
12.04. I run a lab where we regularly get visitors who have never
knowingly used Linux on a PC before. While the popup is supposed to
eventually make Ubuntu less buggy, it feels like Ubuntu is more buggy.
Therefore I've disabled apport since upgrading the lab to 12.04.

I was surprised when I realized that it was not considered a bug for
these error reports to be kept turned on once the release was final. I
also was confused that System Settings>Privacy>Diagnostics>Send error
reports didn't actually stop the popups. I think deploying this
post-release for the first time in an LTS will cause many average
users to believe that 12.04 LTS is not very high quality and not ready
for use.

We want people to use Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. Constantly reminding users
that 12.04 is a broken buggy operating system will likely push them to
use something else. Something else could be 11.10, a different Linux
distribution, or Windows. This is discouraging to those who put a lot
of time and work into fixing as many bugs as possible for this
release.

I agree that we should keep error reporting on for 12.10 and future
releases. I expect that the popups will be quite a bit less
frequent/intrusive for 14.04 LTS.

Jeremy