When did i sign up to work QA for Ubuntu? Did I miss my orientation and providing my direct deposit info?

You get a very good Linux distro without paying a single penny for it. Why not do a little work to help make it better?

I do get a good one. From debian.org and I’ll report any bugs I find in it.

Honest question, is it worth it for an average user to file reports?

The first time I tried this was the last time I tried. It was ca. 2012 on an Acer laptop that I personally configured to dual-boot. My memory is not to be trusted but

- the biggest problem for me was that it asked for a core dump/logfile, which I agreed to, but for some reason or another it could not produce/extract said debug info and I got stuck in a loop of whoopsie trying and failing.

- smaller grievance (I might be wrong) is that I had to create some account (Launchpad?) in order to report the bug. Why can't it be anonymous?!

Everytime I turned this Acer laptop on, there will be 2-3 such prompts from Ubuntu that something report-worthy went wrong. You learn to blend it out like the cookie consent dialogs but still annoying. Plus, everything is still perfectly usable so it does seem like the OS is just making a mountain out of a molehill.

In my experience every time I go to report a bug or submit a feature request on anything, I find that someone else has already done so it and a maintainer has responded with one of these:

- "why would anyone want that?"

- "that bug is not possible."

- "it's working as intended."

[delayed]

GNU Coreutils also has hundreds of open bugs:

https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/pkgreport.cgi?package=coreutils

It's normal to find hundreds of open bugs in large open source projects

True. :)

I really should close some of them, e.g., 8559, since Gnulib, which we depend on, doesn't support IRIX anymore since it is EOL.