Submitting a bug is not on anyone's list of favorite things to do in a day, but that doesn't mean that you can't make it fun. Someone notified the Ubuntu devs about a potential problem in the login screen, but it requires a cat to replicate the bug.

Ubuntu is the most used Linux desktop in the world, but that also brings a ton of bug reports. The Ubuntu devs are not complaining, but you have to keep in mind that someone needs to go over those bugs and triage them, somehow. Many of the bugs can't be reproduced, are not submitted properly, or they are no longer relevant after fixes have landed.

Some of the bugs are very old, but that's because Launchpad usually brings to surface problems affecting multiple users. When a report becomes important enough to be noticed, it's usually fixed. Some problems never seem to get the attention of enough people, so they tend to be carried from one release to another. For others, developers need a cat to replicate it.

Cats are very important in the Ubuntu development cycle

"14.04, locked screen to go to lunch, upon return from lunch cat was sitting on keyboard, login screen was frozen & unresponsive. To replicate: In unity hit ctrl-alt-l, place keyboard on chair. Sit on keyboard. Resolution: Switched to virtual terminal, restarted lightdm, lost all open windows in X session. What should have happened: lightdm not becoming unresponsive," reads the bug report on Launchpad.

Since quite a few people said that this is happening, the status of the bug changed to "confirmed," but developers have a hard time replicating the circumstances that led to the problem, which seem to be directly related to the presence of a cat.

This is a problem mentioned for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and we can only hope that it will be fixed in time for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS; otherwise, people won't be able to trust their Ubuntu computers around cats, and we can't really have that.