Do you want to contribute to the community as an Ubuntu user? One of the simplest methods is by reporting a bug that occurs on your Ubuntu system if any. That way, the developers along with community can address and fix the issue to later they publish the fix as updates to the users. That's the origin of our daily software updates! We will explain it by examples and screenshots we hope you and everyone can follow easily. Now, let's read and try it!

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Basic Knowledge

1. Reporting software bugs is a good contribution to our Free Software Community.

2. All Ubuntu bugs are located publicly at a central development website called Launchpad.

3. Ubuntu is already shipped with automatic bug reporter program called 'ubuntu-bug'.

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Requirements

A Launchpad account. Please register if you don't have one.

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Step 1. Run the problematic program

The first step is to know and make sure you have a program with an issue. You need to identify the name of that program to report it. Of course, you don't want to report a bug of GNOME Shell to KDE Plasma developer team (or vice versa) for example, as it would be a wrong report. You should report a bug of GNOME Shell to GNOME Shell developers. Or, you should report an issue with a program from Ubuntu to Ubuntu developers. The same is true to any other Free Software Projects. In this article, we give you two examples of our bug reports:

• GNOME Notes (bijiben) crashes when running normally with default configuration on Ubuntu 24.04 Edit - submitted February 2025

• xfce4-notes crashes after running for a minute on Ubuntu 24.04 - submitted August 2025

For your information, we found out these two bugs while writing our List of Ubuntu Desktop Notes Applications published last August. 

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Step 2. Run 'ubuntu-bug' Reporter

Then, run this special command line followed by the name of that problematic program. For example:

$ ubuntu-bug bijiben 

$ ubuntu-bug xfce4-notes

First command will report a bug with bijiben, while second one will report xfce4-notes. Like this, you can report any other bug you found out on Ubuntu.   

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Step 3. Fill in the bug report on web browser

Then, your web browser will show Launchpad web page form you need to fill in to report the particular issue. You should be already logged in to do so. For example, while reporting issue with bijiben, we filled in like the following:

• Summary:  "GNOME Notes (bijiben) crashes when running normally with default configuration on Ubuntu 24.04" 

• In what package did you find this bug?: "bijiben"

• Bug description:  "I run GNOME Notes (formerly Bijiben) on Ubuntu 24.04 until I can see the window but when I click New button, it automatically crashes (stopped working) without showing any message. ..." See full report here.

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Step 4. Send bug report

Then, unless your bug report is about a security vulnerability, click Submit Bug Report button. Otherwise, give a check mark to "This bug is about security vulnerability". 

Step 5. Your bug report will be published

Lastly, wait for your bug report to get responses from The Ubuntu Developers and community. Thank you for your report!

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Example 1: Bijiben Crashes (Bug #2098611)

We reported a bug on GNOME Notes (aka Bijiben) which can be viewed here. 

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Example 2: xfce4-notes Crashes (Bug #2120475)

We reported a bug on xfce4-notes which can be viewed here.  

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See Also

1. Submitting Your Ubuntu Laptop Specifications to H-Node.org (Contributing to the Community)

2. Submitting Your Ubuntu Hardware Info to Linux-Hardware.org (Contributing to the Community)

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References

1. Contributing to Ubuntu Project by Canonical

2. How Ubuntu is Made 

3. Bug Squad 

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