Ah, the days that an Acorn Archimedes with an ARM2 running at 8MHz could emulate a 80186 (if I recall correctly) at (near) native speed. It was a very smart move by Acorn: there was a Beeb emulator and a PC emulator.

Neither do some geeks. I prefer my OS working reasonable well out of the box without the need (!) to have to reconfigure things. I don't want a Lego set for each and everything in my life; thank you!

See my other comment. Because I try to document as much as possible of what I install / configure, I have been running Firefox for a while fresh out of the box. I didn't have this problem on 10.04 with an older version of Firefox (except for multimedia crashes). I am currently running 31.0. Links to recent crash reports follow. A quick peek gives me the impression that it's memory allocating/freeing related.

• https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/report/index/9da4e3c8-10b7-472f-99e7-1e1982140814
• https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/report/index/cbf10326-272e-48ee-a442-d8f5c2140811
• https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/report/index/6ef8f9ed-3ad3-43ba-aa49-6af082140810
• https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/report/index/59d35f6f-a3f8-46c0-8466-8ebce2140807

I am one of those silly people who turns off his computer when not in use. Moreover, the thing is that it can happen early on, and after a restart of Firefox it doesn't happen again. Didn't have this problem with an older version of Firefox on 10.04. To add to the weirdness, it quite often happens when I am working in Emacs. I suddenly get the crash dialog. It's like it reacts to some keypress combination. Another reason for crashing, which I did have also on 10.04 with an older version, is multimedia. I haven't installed Flash yet, but it also happens when Firefox wants to use VLC.

I've ran memtest86 for hours already, all is well. Which is not a surprise because the 8G installed is less than 2 years old, rest is less than 7 years old. I've already done a reinstall of 14.04 which is LTS. I've also checked for file corruption by using rsync with the -c (checksum) flag.

The app that chrashes the most is Firefox, followed by Thunderbird. I've checked several of the crash reports of Firefox. Some of those are in Mozilla's top list and have been there for a while. So I doubt it's flakey hardware (been running 10.04 . Like someone else suggested, I do have a lot of tabs open. But I've been doing this for years. If this is the problem, it's a recent one. Didn't have this many issues with 10.04, which I have been running until mid-2014.

Sure, I do keep 100+ tabs open. The thing is, that worked perfectly on an older version of Firefox. And since tabs are loaded on demand I don't even see why that should be a problem. I do report Firefox crashes and a few of the crashes are in the "top list" according to Mozilla, and have been around for a while. So, yeah, typical OSS apologist behavior, let's blame the user.... The easiest solution would be to keep track of max open tabs and the next time just warn "Due to our incompetence you can't have more than 120 tabs open, please close at least 20".

I've done a new install of 14.04 shortly after, just to rule out exactly that problem. As for a flakey bit of disk, we can exclude that as well because I used a different partitioning scheme, unless the whole disk is flakey, which I highly doubt. No, I don't think it's the hardware. As for software, I already mentioned more up that it's Firefox and Thunderbird that crashes the most. If I exclude those I still get more issues compared to the install of 10.04, which I've been running for years on the same hardware, except for the HDD.

Heh, I am a professional. As for the hardware, it has been perfectly able to run 8.04..10.04. And since it seems the best with Ubuntu to do a fresh install - I don't want to think the pile of crap I would've ended up if I had updated from 8.04 all the way to 14.04 over the years - it wouldn't have been smart of me to update to 12.04 a few months ago instead of 14.04. So, yeah, I know it's typical in the Linux community to wave away issues (but (!) it runs perfect on my computer) and blame it on the user (had you but bought the right hardware and weren't a noob) the thing is plain and simply: 14.04 is not that great. It's not me who isn't a professional...

Look, I have had issues with any OS I've used over the past 30+ years. But I've never had this many crashes with a browser as Firefox manages on 14.04, not even with Netscape on IRIX. Ubuntu 14.04 just feels unfinished to me, especially compared to 10.04. I have had in a single month more issues with 14.04 than with 10.04 in 6+ months. And I don't think my hardware just got flakey right after a fresh install on a new hard disk drive.

Thanks, it did indeed the trick (just rebooted). It looks like the crash report got stuck because of the Unicode decoding error.

OK, I deleted one crash report, let's hope that's the reason I saw 4+ "System problem detected" windows. I actually did find that page a few months a go but was not all that happy with the "Disable apport" part. Anyway, let's see if it makes a difference. Thanks!

Ubuntu 14.04 user here. Every time I login I am greeted with a stack of "System problem detected" warnings. Both Firefox and Thunderbird are extremely unstable. Firefox crashes a few times a week. Thunderbird does so twice a week (about). Now and then the whole system hangs when doing a rsync to an external disk (hangs, not busy).

Oh, I am sure Linux apologists blame me, my hardware, etc. But I've been running 10.04 for years on the same hardware, except that I replaced the 320G HDD for a 1TB one and switched to AHCI. Maybe that's the problem?

One issue I see often is this one: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubu... It gives a very unfinished/unstable feel to 14.04

What do you mean, not strong enough? We've managed to walk an Apple wall wart out of an outlet several times. The lightning connecter stayed connected to the iPad.

Never used a ZX Spectrum keyboard?

B) documentation is boring, unrewarding and time consuming to do well so nobody wants to bother.

I actually like to write documentation. And at 100 USD/hr you can certainly drop me a line if this crowd sourcing ever happens.