The “System Program Problem Detected” Pop-up
If you use Ubuntu regularly, you have likely encountered the infamous pop-up dialogue box declaring, “System program problem detected.” This is Apport, Ubuntu’s default error reporting system, in action. When an application crashes or a background process fails, Apport automatically generates a detailed crash report and asks if you want to send this diagnostic data to Canonical’s servers via a service called Whoopsie. While this data helps developers fix bugs, the constant pop-ups can be annoying, and privacy-conscious users often prefer not to transmit memory dumps or system logs automatically over the internet.
Disabling the Apport Service
To eliminate these pop-ups and stop Ubuntu from automatically generating and attempting to send crash reports, you must disable the Apport service entirely.
You can disable this service permanently by editing its configuration file via the terminal. Open a terminal window (Ctrl+Alt+T). Type the following command and press Enter: sudo nano /etc/default/apport. You will be prompted for your administrator password. The Nano text editor will open the file. Look for the line that reads enabled=1. Use your arrow keys to navigate to the ‘1’ and change it to a 0, so the line reads enabled=0. Press Ctrl+O then Enter to save the changes, and Ctrl+X to exit the editor. To apply the change immediately without restarting your computer, run: sudo systemctl stop apport.service. Ubuntu will no longer intercept crashes or prompt you to send reports.