One of the most useful tools I use is errors.ubuntu.com. This shows statistics for the crash reports that are sent from users machines. Before I would trawl through Launchpad trying to work out which crash reports were more significant. Now we have numbers to see what's important.
Here is a graph showing the crash reports received for the last six releases over the last year:
Some interesting things from the graph:- We get more crash reports on weekdays than weekends (see the ripple in the 12.04 and 12.10 lines which otherwise seem quite stable).
- Apparently people stop using Ubuntu development releases around Christmas (huge dip in the middle of the Ubuntu 14.04 line). Stable releases are unaffected.
- You can see a step in crash reports for the 14.04 beta release (March). Looks like there was an outage then too as every release has a dip in reports before.
- It looks like as soon as 14.04 was released (April) there's been a rapid migration from 13.10 users to 14.04 so there is now probably less than half the number of 13.10 users there were before.
- If you look closely you can also see a slight decrease in crash reports from 12.04 after the 14.04 release, so people are migrating LTS to LTS.
- I guess the 12.10 users love it because they don't seem to have started migrating at all.
- We get a huge number of crash reports from release days and these very smoothly drop off over approximately three months. I guess this is due to the bugs being fixed and the users slowly updating.
- Sorry, I don't get the vertical axis any more than you do other than to say "bigger means more crash reports" (bug). The X axis also show months from 2013/2014 (bug).
- Not sure why the left hand side is so high - have we really reduced crash reports that much?