So I noticed a few days ago that videos on msnbc.com had stopped working.  I’m running Ubuntu 11.04 and Unity.  Yes, I know, no flame wars please.  At first I hated it, and now I just use it on all of my machines.  The icon bar is on the left.  Big deal.

On to the topic of this post:  Ubuntu’s bug reporting system.  The first thing I did was to run to the one laptop in the house that was still running Ubuntu 10.04 UNE.  Msnbc videos worked fine there.  So I then went over to Ubuntu’s Launchpad to report the bug.  I noticed, again, that the folks over at Ubuntu have ensured that only people who really, really want to report a bug will actually do so. Everybody else will be left with the impression that the Ubuntu folks really don't want to know about problems, because they make it very difficult to get to that point in their bug reporting system where you can actually REPORT A BUG!

Only to have it sit there and be ignored for millenia.

For those interested, here’s the bug report. Two days later, at the time of this writing, still unassigned.  I confess that I am puzzled at Ubuntu’s continued success at leading in the Linux desktop market, given the horribly unwieldy bug reporting process that they operate.  I also wrote about the last bug that I reported.  It took writing about that one in Linux Journal to even get it acknowledged and assigned. And six months to get it into the next distribution.

Guess I’ll go back to cnn.com for a while...