The Apport Annoyance
If an application crashes in the background on Ubuntu Linux, you are often greeted by a pop-up window stating, “Sorry, Ubuntu has experienced an internal error.” This system is managed by a background service called Apport. By default, Apport intercepts crash data and prompts you to automatically send a massive diagnostic report to the Ubuntu developers. While this helps improve the operating system, the constant pop-ups can be incredibly annoying, especially if a minor background script you wrote keeps crashing harmlessly, triggering an endless stream of error notifications.
How to Disable Apport Pop-Ups via Settings
You can use the graphical interface to tell Ubuntu to stop prompting you to send these diagnostic reports.
1. Open the main Ubuntu Settings application.
2. In the left-hand sidebar, scroll down and click on Privacy (or Privacy & Security).
3. In the main pane, click on Diagnostics.
4. Look for the option labelled Send error reports to Canonical.
5. Change the setting from “Automatic” to Never.
How to Completely Disable Apport via Terminal
Changing the setting in the GUI stops the pop-ups, but the Apport service still runs in the background, consuming CPU cycles to generate the crash logs locally on your hard drive. If you want to kill the system entirely so it stops monitoring for crashes altogether, you must edit its configuration file.
1. Open your terminal application.
2. Run the following command to edit the configuration file with root privileges: sudo nano /etc/default/apport
3. Enter your password when prompted.
4. In the text file that opens, locate the line that says enabled=1.
5. Change the 1 to a 0 (so it reads enabled=0).
6. Save the file by pressing Ctrl+O then Enter, and exit nano by pressing Ctrl+X.
7. To stop the currently running instance without rebooting, run: sudo systemctl stop apport
Ubuntu will no longer monitor for application crashes or generate error reports.