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Despite having just 5.8% sales, over 38% of bug reports come from Linux

1292 points by otreblan 5y ago

hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
I wonder how many people will read just the headline, think, "I knew it!" and move on without actually reading this insightful article.
throwaway984393 5y ago
The Mac and Windows using developers at work never know how to file a bug report. I have to play 20 Questions to get them to give me the information I need to isolate the problem and fix it. The Linux-using developers fix the problem for me.
shultays 5y ago
I am more impressed by 5.8% of sales being from Linux, it was less than a percent in my experience
wly_cdgr 5y ago
I don't know about you - you might be insane for all I know - but I'm MUCH more likely to report a bug if I think there's any chance of it being fixed
- voakbasda 5y ago
  Knowing a bug will be investigated would be enough, never mind fixed. Sadly I would assert that the vast majority of open source projects do not bother to respond to reports or even patches. The result of being ignored enough times is that I have become much less motivated to report bugs on projects that might actually care, unless there is clear and present evidence (openly available) that their issue tracker is sufficiently active. If I have to wait more than a week for a reply, you have lost me for good. If I can’t see evidence of the process working, I will not waste my time.
  - wott 5y ago
    I had much better results with one-man projects, than with projects which have a small army of volunteers and/or of paid employees. In the later case, it feels exactly the same as when I try to get in touch with the various administrations in my area, meaning that I can achieve a similar result by printing my missive, setting it on fire and dancing around it naked.
- dotancohen 5y ago
  Which is why I've stopped reporting LibreOffice bugs. I have had literally hundreds of bugs filed, with test files and reproducibility instructions. Then they changed bug trackers - twice - and all that is lost. With KDE and Mozilla, I'm still seeing bugs fixed a decade after I stopped reporting them. So I might be inclined to file egregious bugs to those two projects, if I feel inclined at the moment to wait a decade for a resolution.
  - terafo 5y ago
    I saw recently twitter complaint about emacs bug filed almost 15 years ago finally getting a wontfix responce(bug was about undo history loss or something). And then they write articles about their new and shiny bug closing process[1]. [1] https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2021/08/14/10x10/ https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2021/08/14/10x10/
    - oblio 5y ago
      https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html Copy paste the link. Or: > I'm so totally impressed at this Way New Development Paradigm. Let's call it the "Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers" model, or "CADT" for short. > It hardly seems worth even having a bug system if the frequency of from-scratch rewrites always outstrips the pace of bug fixing. Why not be honest and resign yourself to the fact that version 0.8 is followed by version 0.8, which is then followed by version 0.8? > But that's what happens when there is no incentive for people to do the parts of programming that aren't fun. Fixing bugs isn't fun; going through the bug list isn't fun; but rewriting everything from scratch is fun (because "this time it will be done right", ha ha) and so that's what happens, over and over again. In your case, replace version "0.8" by "new bug tracker" or "new bug handling process".
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  - davidgerard 5y ago
    > Then they changed bug trackers - twice - and all that is lost. When precisely did this happen?
ok123456 5y ago
Wine's crash handler provides a lot more details and diagnostic information if you know what you're looking at. "Oh RAX was 0 and de-referenced. That looks like a trivial memory error in SomeComponent.dll+0x302223." Other platforms are infantilized: "Oopsey doodle that crashed :(. Look for problem online? Oh no solution found. Sorry about that. Got it?"
- qayxc 5y ago
  That's not platform specific at all. If your program spits out proper crash logs (which most games do), it's a matter of locating and examining the log file. The "if you know what you're looking at"-part is pretty much nonsense as you're basically saying "if you are an experienced programmer with intimate knowledge of both the system and the hardware architecture". This is not something a regular user should be expected to know. A good program should simply provide a proper feedback-channel and collect and send the appropriate information if the user choses to do so.
  - ok123456 5y ago
    >The "if you know what you're looking at"-part is pretty much nonsense as you're basically saying "if you are an experienced programmer with intimate knowledge of both the system and the hardware architecture". Same thing. > This is not something a regular user should be expected to know. A good program should simply provide a proper feedback-channel and collect and send the appropriate information if the user choses to do so. Then why do all these bugs fall through the cracks on other platforms?
    - qayxc 5y ago
      > Then why do all these bugs fall through the cracks on other platforms? Two main reasons: 1) Other platforms are primarily used by non-technical individuals who simply don't care about the OS and who more often than not are unable to tell the difference between bad software ergonomics, user error, and software bugs in the first place. 2) The Linux platform is built around the concept of OSS, where user participation and direct feedback are an essential part of the ecosystem. Most OSS has bug tracking and Wikis that describe how to report a bug and quick release cycles (e.g. fast feedback from the user's perspective). Linux users make a conscious decision to use Linux and some level of involvement in the OSS community is often part of that decision.
bryanrasmussen 5y ago
I've reported bugs to FF and Chrome several times because they were in things I cared about. Developers tend to care more, know that there will be a place to report bugs, know how to do it and so forth. Obviously Linux gets more bug reports. (I use mac, the m1 is just great, but I would never go through the effort of reporting a bug to mac [unless serious security hole] because I don't care about them, and because I have the impression from having tried at one time some years ago that mac bug reporting sucks.)
- WalterGR 5y ago
  FTA: "Do you know how many of these 400 bug reports were actually platform-specific? 3. Literally only 3 things were problems that came out just on Linux. The rest of them were affecting everyone - the thing is, the Linux community is exceptionally well trained in reporting bugs."
  - roofwellhams 5y ago
    That indicates that Linux it's very far away from being mainstream
Procedural 5y ago
There is no such OS as Linux, Linux is the kernel. Support Linux-based OSs you want to support and no other OSs you don't support.
- FastEatSlow 5y ago
  The point is that people who choose an OS other than Windows or Mac tend to choose something based on Linux, and are usually technically skilled and submit much higher quality bug reports, more often. Linux users just care more about the experience of using a computer, otherwise most wouldn't have jumped ship.
  - michaelpb 5y ago
    Also, technical skill aside, Linux users are used to dev <-> consumer relationship being more symmetrical and more of a "two way street". The few non-coder Linux users I know prefer it for this aspect --- similar to why people might shop at a local neighborhood co-op instead of Walmart/Target/Microsoft/Apple
- gpm 5y ago
  There is for all practical purposes a singluar linux. Why? Because you can bundle your own "userspace" to support your game, and that's what steam does for you with it's runtime: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime It has to pick up a few things from the surrounding environment, but steam entirely standardizes the vast majority of it, and the rest of it is really really similar between every linux-running OS.
  - 5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
    TBH this runtime can be replaced, and Arch ships a package which makes it very easy to do https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Steam/Troubleshooting#Steam_native_runtime https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Steam/Troubleshooting#Steam... Sometimes it works better than what Valve ships. It saved me a couple of times.
AdmiralAsshat 5y ago
Glad to see that it was a positive view of the Linux bug reporters, rather than "Bah, I spend all my time fixing packaging issues from entitled Linux users who scream at me that the game doesn't work with their obscure, home-spun distro."
- atomicnumber3 5y ago
  In a similar vein, I think the biggest value-add that Arch has over other distros is that it turns out having the filter of "can follow well written instructions through mildly tricky commands well enough to result in a bootable system" results in a community with a base level of competence, care, and patience that puts it at least two standard deviations above the other distros and at least four (I know how small the percentile is now) above just the general wash of garbage that you get when you Google for Windows issues. It creates similar effects to the different credit card companies. Why would anyone accept Amex and its higher fees? Because they bring you higher value customers, sometimes dramatically higher value.
  - tyingq 5y ago
    WSL is somewhat similar in that installing it was harder than installing most other things on Windows. They've made it easier in Windows 11, and will probably continue that direction. I wonder if MS knows where that leads for them.
    - rubyist5eva 5y ago
      You can literally just do `wsl.exe --install` on the newest builds of Windows 10 and it enables the hypervisor feature and downloads Ubuntu in one command. AFAIK it's the same in Windows 11 (I'm still on 10 and don't plan on upgrading for a few years at least).
      - tyingq 5y ago
        Yes, as I mentioned, they made it easier only very recently. 09/27/2021, actually. And you still have to open cmd.exe or powershell with "run as admin". It is not as easy as installing, say, GitBash. Also, some things are still under documented, or hard to do. Like that "wslg.exe" can be used to make Windows shortcuts to launch graphical programs. Or how to make various systemd things work (pid 1 is not systemd), and so on. Or how to add all the Windows fonts to the Linux distro. I'm saying they will likely improve all this over time.
deleted 5y ago
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baybal2 5y ago
Most Windows users don't even know what a bug report is.
- guscost 5y ago
  Yep, sampling bias.
- zoomablemind 5y ago
  > Most Windows users don't even know what a bug report is. ... or a telemetry. To be fair, given a well-known application (paid especially), users may be more inclined to try to complain about some annoying/unexpected behavior. Just too often it goes onto a forum, so noone knows if this results in a bugreport somewhere.
tyingq 5y ago
Great article, though he's benefitting from a specific slice of Linux users that are great to work with. On the other end of the spectrum, try releasing a php plugin for Wordpress, OpenCart, Magento, etc. I released a mildly popular, open-source, free add on in this space. The Linux users there are decidedly less technical, but still doing it themselves. What I got for "bug reports" was mostly terrible, few details/logs/etc. And a weird entitlement thing where people had really high support expectations over something that was open source and free. Even a few expletive-laden emails. I did receive a few really helpful reports, pull-requests, and thank you emails...but they were very much the exception.
- oefrha 5y ago
  In addition, in my experience maintaining a developer tool, an outsized source of bug reports is Linux users reporting already fixed issues in their outdated distro packages, or even problems introduced by their packager (e.g. flatpak/snap permission problems). And they typically won’t identify the version despite clear instructions in the issue template asking for the debug output containing everything I need, including the version.
  - ajvs 5y ago
    Don't blame the user here - your bug reporting template should have users declare what package version they're using so that you can easily tell them they're on an outdated package. Flatpak is usually a boon in this regard since you can ensure your users are all on the latest packages, though you're making the tradeoff of having to deal with any Flatpak-specific bugs (which I'd say is a decent tradeoff for solo maintainers).
    - tyingq 5y ago
      Bug templates help, of course. But people do still just dump the wrong stuff in until the report is accepted. Like some kind of OS version in the App version field, for example. Or some ambiguous thing like "latest". Or copy/paste from an existing bug report from some other person. You can see this on many public repos.
lmeyerov 5y ago
Yep we find a variant of this with our python open source data science users who normal businesses would hate: - Across all Python envs (Jupyter, streamlit/plotly, flask/Django, ...), they report way more bugs, and often from our free tiers, which sounds low ROI.. but our community caught all but ~2 significant bugs we fixed this year that our internal automated testing missed and would have otherwise gone to our Enterprise and gov users . They are happy to exchange a tiny bit of GPU or viz burps for new features faster, as long as we are responsive to their reports! That also pushed us to a better dev cadence which wouldn't have worked for our Enterprise users. More subtle, we have more confidence for deploying wider features/APIs which would otherwise be too underused + risky for the same reason. - they are often doing innovative new things with our stack, which originally meant feature requests for non-repeatable sales.. but ended up stretching our flexibility into wider applicability, and they can clearly tell us areas to advance the visual, analytic, etc sides of our R&D and package it up for the rest of their internal analysts. Almost like a multiplier for conversations with our more operationally focused no-code/low-code users, and helps us see around the corner for them in the AI+API+customization sides! - most of our technical partnership discussions now go through our OSS client repos. Rather than PowerPoints with BD people that don't have staff to do things, a product dev or sales engineer/architect or devrel blogger will think, "oh our customers would benefit from better interactive visuals on our data, let me whip something up quick with that package" and we help them take it from there - open source data users like PyData developers and data scientists, compared to say the # of SMBs out there or general enterprise employees, is small and almost by definition doesn't pay for most software... but they end up being attached to projects that do, and influence much of their organization that definitely does!
- Apofis 5y ago
  We're just used contributing bug reports and pull requests, sort of our thing. It's not as prevalent with Windows or MacOS users, just not part of that culture.
thrwyoilarticle 5y ago
On the other hand, a Windows user is trained not to report bugs, especially in games. There's rarely a channel for reporting things & simple bugs go unfixed unless the community can work out some hack to do it for themselves. Games are abandonware monoliths on day one. Secondly, if a program crashes in Windows and you try to force kill it, you get blocked waiting for the 'report' to be sent do Microsoft. Users are trained to click off this, so the OS will finally do what you asked it to.
- wildrhythms 5y ago
  Do you think this has something to do with how many Windows programs (not just games) handle errors and crashes? Even Windows still uses the "Error code: <bunch of meaningless numbers>" scheme. I can't even think of the last time I even attempted to get crash logs for a Windows program; however, on Linux I can usually find where logs got dumped and debug without as much of a headache.
  - _fat_santa 5y ago
    I've noticed this too, compare any forum thread for a AAA Windows game and a Linux game, the Windows game thread is going to look like a bunch of chickens running with their heads cut off wondering why the 0x00423 error is causing the game to crash. Head over to a Linux thread and it's a usually a much more productive conversation because the errors are just clearer.
  - II2II 5y ago
    ... and if you search for that meaningless number and manage to find a proper support page, you are usually left with as much information as you started with. I don't understand why open source developers are so much better in this respect, but the diagnostics usually leave me feeling as though I could solve the problem even when I don't have the technical skills to do so. Being able to comb through the logs to pinpoint the problem is a major contributor in this respect. (The only counter example I can think of at the moment is Samba, and guess what ... it interfaces with Microsoft products!)
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
cs702 5y ago
Notably, of those bug reports, fewer than 1% (only 3 bugs) were specific to the Linux version of the game. That is, over 99% of the bugs reported by Linux gamers also affected players in other platforms. Moreover (quoting from the OP): > The report quality [from Linux users] is stellar. I mean we have all seen bug reports like: “it crashes for me after a few hours”. Do you know what a developer can do with such a report? Feel sorry at best. You can’t really fix any bug unless you can replicate it, see it with your own eyes, peek inside and finally see that it’s fixed. And with bug reports from Linux players is just something else. You get all the software/os versions, all the logs, you get core dumps and you get replication steps. Sometimes I got with the player over discord and we quickly iterated a few versions with progressive fixes to isolate the problem. You just don’t get that kind of engagement from anyone else.
- elliekelly 5y ago
  Are there any good articles on writing helpful bug reports? Whenever I submit a bug I try to give as much detail and be as specific as possible but I always imagine some dev somewhere reading it rolling their eyes at the unnecessary paragraphs I’ve submitted.
  - ArloL 5y ago
    I can recommend https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html
    - elliekelly 5y ago
      Thank you! I’m definitely guilty of mongoose-ing and diagnosing in my bug reports so this is very helpful!
      - jraph 5y ago
        > diagnosing in my bug reports It's probably fine, if you put it in a separate section, clearing indicating that you are guessing. At work we have an optional "diagnostic" section in our ticket template, mainly intended for the team, but I'd be happy to see a user try to fill it. At worse it's harmless, at best it gives the actual reason, somewhere in the middle it can give ideas even if it is wrong.
noisy_boy 5y ago
> the thing is, the Linux community is exceptionally well trained in reporting bugs I don't have any stats to back up my claim but I believe a good chunk of those Linux users are tech folks - well, we submit bugs all day long at work, of course we are trained to do so!
peey 5y ago
the titled should be updated to say "the Linux community" at the end, as on the original page
- otreblan 5y ago
  The original title was too long
croes 5y ago
I think Windows users are used to live with bugs and work around them. Linux users prefer to adapt a system to their needs, Windows users adapt to the system.
- qayxc 5y ago
  Or maybe it's much simpler than that: Linux attracts people who are more tech savvy and like to get involved. Windows users are often incapable of understanding even basic OS concepts. There's often no need to go any deeper than that. Same with Mac users: there's a considerable demographic to whom an OS is simply just an app launcher (which IMHO is fine), maybe even just the browser. There's a reason ChromeOS has been so successful.
wheels 5y ago
For an audio app that I work on, it's similar, but different: around 1% of the users are on Linux, and around a third of the bugs / complaints come from Linux, but they're virtually all Linux specific. We're having to seriously consider dropping Linux support because the support / maintenance load is so high. (This comes significantly from the libraries we're using having worse Linux support, and a lot from the Linux audio ecosystem in general not being very mature; and then a whole bunch of it is people wanting packages for dozens of different systems.)
- rpmisms 5y ago
  Linux audio support is generally a pain. Have you considered officially supporting one audio library and just saying YMMV if you use something else? For example, only support ALSA.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  I would think you can deal with platform-specific issues by saying "we support Ubuntu [or whatever you're willing to do]; anything else you're on your own" up front. But yeah, audio is a general weak spot.
  - wheels 5y ago
    We do that. In bold. Still doesn't stop people from writing to us at least once a week asking for something else or reporting that the Ubuntu package doesn't work on their distro.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
      That is unfortunate; it sucks that the cost of WONTFIXing a ticket isn't zero:\
  - edflsafoiewq 5y ago
    I won't buy closed source programs with "Linux ports" anymore for this reason: it seems to always mean "some dev got it working on one Ubuntu version once". The last bug of this form I hit was a program trying to read a hardcoded path that apparently exists on Ubuntu and blissfully segfaulting if it didn't exist...
swalls 5y ago
Kudos to them. I remember reading a report from a game dev a few years ago that said basically the same thing and came to the conclusion, "... and that's why we're ending our Linux support," which utterly baffled me.
gwern 5y ago
Another example of "they'll never tell you": https://pointersgonewild.com/2019/11/02/they-might-never-tell-you-its-broken/ https://pointersgonewild.com/2019/11/02/they-might-never-tel... One thought: if merely 'being a Linux user' can enrich bug report rates by a factor of 6.5x, how many bugs are still not being reported...?
da39a3ee 5y ago
A good trick for removing unintelligent content from google search results on any general computing issue is to prefix the search terms with "linux". And I'm a Mac user :)
- gizmo686 5y ago
  As an Ubuntu and RHEL user, I tend to prefix my searches with "arch", for the same reason (although if you have a subscription, and your issue is with a RHEL system, RHEL is worth searching first, as they often have a bug report with resolution for your exact issue).
reginold 5y ago
When I submitted a bug to Linux distro Pop OS, it was fixed and deployed within days to all users. Can you imagine anything like that with Windows or Mac OS? We have reports how Apple silences zero day researchers instead.
- johnnyanmac 5y ago
  Microsoft/Appple don't have nightlies. For systems as complex as that, it can take days just to land it in some dev feature branch, let alone get into into a production branch scheduled by product managers to deploy whenever.
dbg31415 5y ago
This article does and doesn't mirror my experience. When the pandemic hit, I helped my now 15 year-old godson build a video game add-on as a way to stay close since we couldn't travel. For the last two years we've had a blast working on this together. The add-on has grown in popularity, and has a few dozen thousand users. Where I agree with the article, many of the complaints do come from Linux users. Almost without exception though, the bugs they reported were Linux-specific, or related to old-versions of the add-on that we no longer supported. A lot of times the Linux users were a release version or more behind because the emulation software they were running hadn't been updated to run the latest version of the game. They'd update the add-on, before updating the game, and then be upset when it didn't work on the slightly less than new version. Building a work around for this was a valuable lesson for my godson, in that we had to plan for the imperfect-path and make sure the add-on had a lot of edge cases baked in. Some other things I've noticed... Linux users do tend to report more bugs, but mostly because Linux users tend to be quick to anger. Customer support for Linux users... it was never pleasant. Someone would say something like, "Don't you test your shit?!" and like keep in mind this is a free add-on for a video game... and they'd be irate that we hadn't tested it on every system imaginable before releasing it. Linux users don't accept reality. Often they're aren't running the "real" instance of the game, they are running some hacked together thing running on some emulator... it's not going to be perfect. Or they were running the game on unsupported hardware that they rigged a work around for. A lot of times they'd swear the bug only came about due to our add-on, but countless hours wasted trying to appease folks like this and 99% of the time it was a bug on their end. We'd probably have had 20% more "real" dev time if we didn't ever engage with those people in the first place. Linux users tend to be more European, and there was certainly a language barrier at times. Made supporting the add-on for them worse because bug reports would come in bad-English, or German run through Google Translate to English... or just in German. There seemed to be a large number of mid-30s Germans playing a game that I'd say was aimed more for teenagers... Without sugar coating it, bug reports form those people always felt like, "Doesn't this loser have anything better to do?" Linux users do tend to be more technical, and often they have suggestions for improvement in mind. But rarely do any of them take the time to crate a PR. It was infuriating. We'd have one guy complain every week on an open ticket... we'd say, "Hey mate, we're backed up... we'll get to this when there's time. Feel free to submit a PR!" and instead he'd just paste 80% the code he wanted updated in the GitHub ticket, and then nag us every week to fix the bug. It would have been an easy enough fix, except it required us to install Linux to verify the fix. Oof. Broad ways I wish every community was better? Don't be a dick. So many of the complaints came from these man-children and every other word was a profanity. Especially on open-source projects, just understand how nice you are directly correlates to how fast your issue gets worked on. If you can fix something, don't bitch about it... just push a PR. If you push a PR, test it first. Don't assume it's on someone else to do more testing than you'd care to do. "Oh man, that would require me to do X, Y, Z... that would take hours!" Yeah, it would require anyone testing to do X, Y, Z... if you want it fixed, the fix includes testing on X, Y, Z... not just writing the code. Way more testers are needed for all open source projects, but most end users -- even the ones who can't code -- don't really want to help the project by volunteering testing time. If there's a project you like, and you can't code, you should still reach out to the creator and say, "Hey, how can I help test?"
dopu 5y ago
This is great. By the way, one of the things that has often discouraged me from filing bugs is not really knowing how to do so. Sometimes, looking at issues on github, I find people provide super structured and clean descriptions of bugs. Then there are the other kind, that the author describes: “it crashes.” Is there a standard way of describing bugs? What resources/standards have people found useful to refer to when reporting one?
- tpxl 5y ago
  There are a bunch of open source projects on github with issue templates. Have a look at a couple of those and pick one that suits you.
rpmisms 5y ago
I bought this game because I appreciate good devs and want to encourage linux support in gaming. This game is phenomenal, I can't stop playing. Intuitive, good UI, tons of fun. Thanks!
terafo 5y ago
It's worth noting that this game uses Godot engine, which is open source and built with Linux in mind, and most platform compatibility complexity was shifted to engine. Experience is quite different for big game developers that have their own engines and can't offload complexity to another layer of abstraction, supporting a lot of hardware/software combinations on Linux for them is quite hard. I presume that's why there are games that didn't get PC Linux releases while technically having Linux port(Cyberpunk 2077 would be prime example).
- qayxc 5y ago
  For most AAA titles the reason is simply 3rd-party DRM and/or Anti-Cheat not working on Linux.
  - terafo 5y ago
    I'm talking about native Linux ports, not Proton compatibility. There is Linux port of Cyberpunk 2077 and we know it because there is Stadia version of game. And Linux versions of Hitman 3, Control, more than a dozen of Ubisoft games(they basically have Linux versions of all their major engines), two latest Doom games. And Denuvo DRM(which is basically only game in town right now) doesn't affect compatibility with Linux that much, DRMed games like RDR2 work just fine. Anticheats are bigger problem, but they are being dealt with. Biggest anticheat providers are now Proton compatible.
- account42 5y ago
  > Experience is quite different for big game developers that have their own engines and can't offload complexity to another layer of abstraction, supporting a lot of hardware/software combinations on Linux for them is quite hard. Oh but they can offload that complexity to e.g. SDL [0] As for why games like Cyberpunk 2077 are not on Linux, we can only speculate. Remember however that for a profit-focused publisher/developer the Linux port not only has to be profitable to make sense, it has to be more profitable than other things they could spend their time on. [0] http://libsdl.org/ http://libsdl.org/
  - 5y ago
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
Negative feedback is insanely valuable. I write about that here:[0]. Here's what I wrote: > It can be mighty unpleasant to read negative reviews and comments about our work, but it’s worth it to do so, as long as we’re doing it to improve said work. I often say that positive affirmations feel good, but negative feedback is required to improve a product. Negative feedback, even if it’s uncouth diatribes from unpleasant people, is far more valuable than the most glowing praise (unless said “glowing praise” comes from Consumer Reports). Simply put, negative feedback is a goldmine. DON’T WASTE IT. Steel yourself. Take a belt of absinthe, if you need, and open the “Comments” section. Read everything. It sucks, doesn’t it? Is that even physically possible? Don’t you wish you were in good enough shape to do it? Do you remember your mother ever saying anything that could indicate this were true? Wait. What was that they said about the communication error report alert? [0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/the-road-most-traveled-by/#feedback https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/the-road-most-travel...
- godelski 5y ago
  There's another piece of advice I've heard along these lines. > Listen to the users complaining. Users are very good at identifying problems that you missed or can't see because you're too close to the project. But be careful listening to users about solutions to the problems. They can't see the whole picture. I think this is good advice. You should want to make the best product you can. Some users have good ideas and can see things you can't. But it is hard to get the signal out of the noise and this can be very frustrating.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
    Agreed. Like Henry Ford is quoted as saying: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have told me 'A faster horse!'."
    - godelski 5y ago
      Yeah and it takes skill to distill what they actually want out of that comment. People don't want a faster horse, they want a faster method of transportation. This is easy to miss, especially the more technical jargon people use when explaining what they want.
cromka 5y ago
Interview with the author, mostly touching the Linux development of the game: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/05/an-interview-with-kodera-software-creator-of-the-hard-sci-fi-dv-rings-of-saturn https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/05/an-interview-with-kode...
deleted 5y ago
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Timpy 5y ago
The whole thread was interesting but this comment had me cracking up: >Same experience here. Linux folks not only are our most frequent bug reporters, but they're also the best at documenting their issues and sometimes just... give us code for UI improvements?
giuliomagnifico 5y ago
Just for kidding but... do you think windows users are able to make/know what is it a bug report?
milesvp 5y ago
I'm reminded of Valve talking about supporting Linux for their half-life2 engine. Their experience was that they were able to find some fabulous engine speed up improvements that they then backported to the windows version. The common thread with supporting Linux seems to be that it's not necessarily worth it from a revenue/market size point of view, but there are all kinds of intangibles that you only get by doing cross platform development.
- johnnyanmac 5y ago
  At the coprorate level, intangibles don't help you move up the chain, unforuntately. I imaigne there are many well-intentioned devs that lack the choice to keep working on these things, or have to make other choices in the grand scheme of things.
brtknr 5y ago
Appreciate the old reddit url, so much more readable imo.
phendrenad2 5y ago
It's a sci-fi 2D space mining simulator. It's already going to attract the type of user who files detailed and specific bug reports. If the author made a Call of Duty clone for Linux, would they get as many great bug reports? I don't think so.
mikaalnaik 5y ago
I love that this links to the legacy reddit ui.
m0zg 5y ago
TL;DR: reason number one million why you should be using Free software whenever you can: you don't feel helpless about bugs.
LongTimeAnon 5y ago
Hrmmm. This appears to be a trend. Moving averages suggest in some short time 13% of those sales may account for 50% of the bugs. They should drop Linux support and save themselves the hassle.
- deeberl 5y ago
  Despite being 13% of the userbase
ksaj 5y ago
Looking at the numbers, and the fact that most of the bugs affect all OS's playing the games, the title should probably something more like "Linux users file more reliable bug reports" That's basically what's being said here, but you just know flag wavers are going to take the title to mean that Linux is more buggy.
c-smile 5y ago
It just means that Linux users are more technically savvy I would say. If you've installed and use Linux then 90% your interests are in IT / software / hardware design. So you know concept of a bug. And it is a good chance you've produced and fixed those by your own too. The best person to report a bug is a programmer really.

1292 points by otreblan 5y ago

I wonder how many people will read just the headline, think, "I knew it!" and move on without actually reading this insightful article.

throwaway984393 5y ago

The Mac and Windows using developers at work never know how to file a bug report. I have to play 20 Questions to get them to give me the information I need to isolate the problem and fix it. The Linux-using developers fix the problem for me.

shultays 5y ago

I am more impressed by 5.8% of sales being from Linux, it was less than a percent in my experience

wly_cdgr 5y ago

I don't know about you - you might be insane for all I know - but I'm MUCH more likely to report a bug if I think there's any chance of it being fixed

voakbasda 5y ago
Knowing a bug will be investigated would be enough, never mind fixed. Sadly I would assert that the vast majority of open source projects do not bother to respond to reports or even patches. The result of being ignored enough times is that I have become much less motivated to report bugs on projects that might actually care, unless there is clear and present evidence (openly available) that their issue tracker is sufficiently active. If I have to wait more than a week for a reply, you have lost me for good. If I can’t see evidence of the process working, I will not waste my time.
- wott 5y ago
  I had much better results with one-man projects, than with projects which have a small army of volunteers and/or of paid employees. In the later case, it feels exactly the same as when I try to get in touch with the various administrations in my area, meaning that I can achieve a similar result by printing my missive, setting it on fire and dancing around it naked.
dotancohen 5y ago
Which is why I've stopped reporting LibreOffice bugs. I have had literally hundreds of bugs filed, with test files and reproducibility instructions. Then they changed bug trackers - twice - and all that is lost. With KDE and Mozilla, I'm still seeing bugs fixed a decade after I stopped reporting them. So I might be inclined to file egregious bugs to those two projects, if I feel inclined at the moment to wait a decade for a resolution.
- terafo 5y ago
  I saw recently twitter complaint about emacs bug filed almost 15 years ago finally getting a wontfix responce(bug was about undo history loss or something). And then they write articles about their new and shiny bug closing process[1]. [1] https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2021/08/14/10x10/ https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2021/08/14/10x10/
  - oblio 5y ago
    https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html Copy paste the link. Or: > I'm so totally impressed at this Way New Development Paradigm. Let's call it the "Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers" model, or "CADT" for short. > It hardly seems worth even having a bug system if the frequency of from-scratch rewrites always outstrips the pace of bug fixing. Why not be honest and resign yourself to the fact that version 0.8 is followed by version 0.8, which is then followed by version 0.8? > But that's what happens when there is no incentive for people to do the parts of programming that aren't fun. Fixing bugs isn't fun; going through the bug list isn't fun; but rewriting everything from scratch is fun (because "this time it will be done right", ha ha) and so that's what happens, over and over again. In your case, replace version "0.8" by "new bug tracker" or "new bug handling process".
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- davidgerard 5y ago
  > Then they changed bug trackers - twice - and all that is lost. When precisely did this happen?

ok123456 5y ago

Wine's crash handler provides a lot more details and diagnostic information if you know what you're looking at. "Oh RAX was 0 and de-referenced. That looks like a trivial memory error in SomeComponent.dll+0x302223." Other platforms are infantilized: "Oopsey doodle that crashed :(. Look for problem online? Oh no solution found. Sorry about that. Got it?"

qayxc 5y ago
That's not platform specific at all. If your program spits out proper crash logs (which most games do), it's a matter of locating and examining the log file. The "if you know what you're looking at"-part is pretty much nonsense as you're basically saying "if you are an experienced programmer with intimate knowledge of both the system and the hardware architecture". This is not something a regular user should be expected to know. A good program should simply provide a proper feedback-channel and collect and send the appropriate information if the user choses to do so.
- ok123456 5y ago
  >The "if you know what you're looking at"-part is pretty much nonsense as you're basically saying "if you are an experienced programmer with intimate knowledge of both the system and the hardware architecture". Same thing. > This is not something a regular user should be expected to know. A good program should simply provide a proper feedback-channel and collect and send the appropriate information if the user choses to do so. Then why do all these bugs fall through the cracks on other platforms?
  - qayxc 5y ago
    > Then why do all these bugs fall through the cracks on other platforms? Two main reasons: 1) Other platforms are primarily used by non-technical individuals who simply don't care about the OS and who more often than not are unable to tell the difference between bad software ergonomics, user error, and software bugs in the first place. 2) The Linux platform is built around the concept of OSS, where user participation and direct feedback are an essential part of the ecosystem. Most OSS has bug tracking and Wikis that describe how to report a bug and quick release cycles (e.g. fast feedback from the user's perspective). Linux users make a conscious decision to use Linux and some level of involvement in the OSS community is often part of that decision.

bryanrasmussen 5y ago

I've reported bugs to FF and Chrome several times because they were in things I cared about. Developers tend to care more, know that there will be a place to report bugs, know how to do it and so forth. Obviously Linux gets more bug reports. (I use mac, the m1 is just great, but I would never go through the effort of reporting a bug to mac [unless serious security hole] because I don't care about them, and because I have the impression from having tried at one time some years ago that mac bug reporting sucks.)

WalterGR 5y ago
FTA: "Do you know how many of these 400 bug reports were actually platform-specific? 3. Literally only 3 things were problems that came out just on Linux. The rest of them were affecting everyone - the thing is, the Linux community is exceptionally well trained in reporting bugs."
- roofwellhams 5y ago
  That indicates that Linux it's very far away from being mainstream

Procedural 5y ago

There is no such OS as Linux, Linux is the kernel. Support Linux-based OSs you want to support and no other OSs you don't support.

FastEatSlow 5y ago
The point is that people who choose an OS other than Windows or Mac tend to choose something based on Linux, and are usually technically skilled and submit much higher quality bug reports, more often. Linux users just care more about the experience of using a computer, otherwise most wouldn't have jumped ship.
- michaelpb 5y ago
  Also, technical skill aside, Linux users are used to dev <-> consumer relationship being more symmetrical and more of a "two way street". The few non-coder Linux users I know prefer it for this aspect --- similar to why people might shop at a local neighborhood co-op instead of Walmart/Target/Microsoft/Apple
gpm 5y ago
There is for all practical purposes a singluar linux. Why? Because you can bundle your own "userspace" to support your game, and that's what steam does for you with it's runtime: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime It has to pick up a few things from the surrounding environment, but steam entirely standardizes the vast majority of it, and the rest of it is really really similar between every linux-running OS.
- 5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
  TBH this runtime can be replaced, and Arch ships a package which makes it very easy to do https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Steam/Troubleshooting#Steam_native_runtime https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Steam/Troubleshooting#Steam... Sometimes it works better than what Valve ships. It saved me a couple of times.

AdmiralAsshat 5y ago

Glad to see that it was a positive view of the Linux bug reporters, rather than "Bah, I spend all my time fixing packaging issues from entitled Linux users who scream at me that the game doesn't work with their obscure, home-spun distro."

atomicnumber3 5y ago
In a similar vein, I think the biggest value-add that Arch has over other distros is that it turns out having the filter of "can follow well written instructions through mildly tricky commands well enough to result in a bootable system" results in a community with a base level of competence, care, and patience that puts it at least two standard deviations above the other distros and at least four (I know how small the percentile is now) above just the general wash of garbage that you get when you Google for Windows issues. It creates similar effects to the different credit card companies. Why would anyone accept Amex and its higher fees? Because they bring you higher value customers, sometimes dramatically higher value.
- tyingq 5y ago
  WSL is somewhat similar in that installing it was harder than installing most other things on Windows. They've made it easier in Windows 11, and will probably continue that direction. I wonder if MS knows where that leads for them.
  - rubyist5eva 5y ago
    You can literally just do `wsl.exe --install` on the newest builds of Windows 10 and it enables the hypervisor feature and downloads Ubuntu in one command. AFAIK it's the same in Windows 11 (I'm still on 10 and don't plan on upgrading for a few years at least).
    - tyingq 5y ago
      Yes, as I mentioned, they made it easier only very recently. 09/27/2021, actually. And you still have to open cmd.exe or powershell with "run as admin". It is not as easy as installing, say, GitBash. Also, some things are still under documented, or hard to do. Like that "wslg.exe" can be used to make Windows shortcuts to launch graphical programs. Or how to make various systemd things work (pid 1 is not systemd), and so on. Or how to add all the Windows fonts to the Linux distro. I'm saying they will likely improve all this over time.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

baybal2 5y ago

Most Windows users don't even know what a bug report is.

guscost 5y ago
Yep, sampling bias.
zoomablemind 5y ago
> Most Windows users don't even know what a bug report is. ... or a telemetry. To be fair, given a well-known application (paid especially), users may be more inclined to try to complain about some annoying/unexpected behavior. Just too often it goes onto a forum, so noone knows if this results in a bugreport somewhere.

tyingq 5y ago

Great article, though he's benefitting from a specific slice of Linux users that are great to work with. On the other end of the spectrum, try releasing a php plugin for Wordpress, OpenCart, Magento, etc. I released a mildly popular, open-source, free add on in this space. The Linux users there are decidedly less technical, but still doing it themselves. What I got for "bug reports" was mostly terrible, few details/logs/etc. And a weird entitlement thing where people had really high support expectations over something that was open source and free. Even a few expletive-laden emails. I did receive a few really helpful reports, pull-requests, and thank you emails...but they were very much the exception.

oefrha 5y ago
In addition, in my experience maintaining a developer tool, an outsized source of bug reports is Linux users reporting already fixed issues in their outdated distro packages, or even problems introduced by their packager (e.g. flatpak/snap permission problems). And they typically won’t identify the version despite clear instructions in the issue template asking for the debug output containing everything I need, including the version.
- ajvs 5y ago
  Don't blame the user here - your bug reporting template should have users declare what package version they're using so that you can easily tell them they're on an outdated package. Flatpak is usually a boon in this regard since you can ensure your users are all on the latest packages, though you're making the tradeoff of having to deal with any Flatpak-specific bugs (which I'd say is a decent tradeoff for solo maintainers).
  - tyingq 5y ago
    Bug templates help, of course. But people do still just dump the wrong stuff in until the report is accepted. Like some kind of OS version in the App version field, for example. Or some ambiguous thing like "latest". Or copy/paste from an existing bug report from some other person. You can see this on many public repos.

lmeyerov 5y ago

Yep we find a variant of this with our python open source data science users who normal businesses would hate: - Across all Python envs (Jupyter, streamlit/plotly, flask/Django, ...), they report way more bugs, and often from our free tiers, which sounds low ROI.. but our community caught all but ~2 significant bugs we fixed this year that our internal automated testing missed and would have otherwise gone to our Enterprise and gov users . They are happy to exchange a tiny bit of GPU or viz burps for new features faster, as long as we are responsive to their reports! That also pushed us to a better dev cadence which wouldn't have worked for our Enterprise users. More subtle, we have more confidence for deploying wider features/APIs which would otherwise be too underused + risky for the same reason. - they are often doing innovative new things with our stack, which originally meant feature requests for non-repeatable sales.. but ended up stretching our flexibility into wider applicability, and they can clearly tell us areas to advance the visual, analytic, etc sides of our R&D and package it up for the rest of their internal analysts. Almost like a multiplier for conversations with our more operationally focused no-code/low-code users, and helps us see around the corner for them in the AI+API+customization sides! - most of our technical partnership discussions now go through our OSS client repos. Rather than PowerPoints with BD people that don't have staff to do things, a product dev or sales engineer/architect or devrel blogger will think, "oh our customers would benefit from better interactive visuals on our data, let me whip something up quick with that package" and we help them take it from there - open source data users like PyData developers and data scientists, compared to say the # of SMBs out there or general enterprise employees, is small and almost by definition doesn't pay for most software... but they end up being attached to projects that do, and influence much of their organization that definitely does!

Apofis 5y ago
We're just used contributing bug reports and pull requests, sort of our thing. It's not as prevalent with Windows or MacOS users, just not part of that culture.

thrwyoilarticle 5y ago

On the other hand, a Windows user is trained not to report bugs, especially in games. There's rarely a channel for reporting things & simple bugs go unfixed unless the community can work out some hack to do it for themselves. Games are abandonware monoliths on day one. Secondly, if a program crashes in Windows and you try to force kill it, you get blocked waiting for the 'report' to be sent do Microsoft. Users are trained to click off this, so the OS will finally do what you asked it to.

wildrhythms 5y ago
Do you think this has something to do with how many Windows programs (not just games) handle errors and crashes? Even Windows still uses the "Error code: <bunch of meaningless numbers>" scheme. I can't even think of the last time I even attempted to get crash logs for a Windows program; however, on Linux I can usually find where logs got dumped and debug without as much of a headache.
- _fat_santa 5y ago
  I've noticed this too, compare any forum thread for a AAA Windows game and a Linux game, the Windows game thread is going to look like a bunch of chickens running with their heads cut off wondering why the 0x00423 error is causing the game to crash. Head over to a Linux thread and it's a usually a much more productive conversation because the errors are just clearer.
- II2II 5y ago
  ... and if you search for that meaningless number and manage to find a proper support page, you are usually left with as much information as you started with. I don't understand why open source developers are so much better in this respect, but the diagnostics usually leave me feeling as though I could solve the problem even when I don't have the technical skills to do so. Being able to comb through the logs to pinpoint the problem is a major contributor in this respect. (The only counter example I can think of at the moment is Samba, and guess what ... it interfaces with Microsoft products!)
AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago

cs702 5y ago

Notably, of those bug reports, fewer than 1% (only 3 bugs) were specific to the Linux version of the game. That is, over 99% of the bugs reported by Linux gamers also affected players in other platforms. Moreover (quoting from the OP): > The report quality [from Linux users] is stellar. I mean we have all seen bug reports like: “it crashes for me after a few hours”. Do you know what a developer can do with such a report? Feel sorry at best. You can’t really fix any bug unless you can replicate it, see it with your own eyes, peek inside and finally see that it’s fixed. And with bug reports from Linux players is just something else. You get all the software/os versions, all the logs, you get core dumps and you get replication steps. Sometimes I got with the player over discord and we quickly iterated a few versions with progressive fixes to isolate the problem. You just don’t get that kind of engagement from anyone else.

elliekelly 5y ago
Are there any good articles on writing helpful bug reports? Whenever I submit a bug I try to give as much detail and be as specific as possible but I always imagine some dev somewhere reading it rolling their eyes at the unnecessary paragraphs I’ve submitted.
- ArloL 5y ago
  I can recommend https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html
  - elliekelly 5y ago
    Thank you! I’m definitely guilty of mongoose-ing and diagnosing in my bug reports so this is very helpful!
    - jraph 5y ago
      > diagnosing in my bug reports It's probably fine, if you put it in a separate section, clearing indicating that you are guessing. At work we have an optional "diagnostic" section in our ticket template, mainly intended for the team, but I'd be happy to see a user try to fill it. At worse it's harmless, at best it gives the actual reason, somewhere in the middle it can give ideas even if it is wrong.

noisy_boy 5y ago

> the thing is, the Linux community is exceptionally well trained in reporting bugs I don't have any stats to back up my claim but I believe a good chunk of those Linux users are tech folks - well, we submit bugs all day long at work, of course we are trained to do so!

peey 5y ago

the titled should be updated to say "the Linux community" at the end, as on the original page

otreblan 5y ago
The original title was too long

croes 5y ago

I think Windows users are used to live with bugs and work around them. Linux users prefer to adapt a system to their needs, Windows users adapt to the system.

qayxc 5y ago
Or maybe it's much simpler than that: Linux attracts people who are more tech savvy and like to get involved. Windows users are often incapable of understanding even basic OS concepts. There's often no need to go any deeper than that. Same with Mac users: there's a considerable demographic to whom an OS is simply just an app launcher (which IMHO is fine), maybe even just the browser. There's a reason ChromeOS has been so successful.

wheels 5y ago

For an audio app that I work on, it's similar, but different: around 1% of the users are on Linux, and around a third of the bugs / complaints come from Linux, but they're virtually all Linux specific. We're having to seriously consider dropping Linux support because the support / maintenance load is so high. (This comes significantly from the libraries we're using having worse Linux support, and a lot from the Linux audio ecosystem in general not being very mature; and then a whole bunch of it is people wanting packages for dozens of different systems.)

rpmisms 5y ago
Linux audio support is generally a pain. Have you considered officially supporting one audio library and just saying YMMV if you use something else? For example, only support ALSA.
yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
I would think you can deal with platform-specific issues by saying "we support Ubuntu [or whatever you're willing to do]; anything else you're on your own" up front. But yeah, audio is a general weak spot.
- wheels 5y ago
  We do that. In bold. Still doesn't stop people from writing to us at least once a week asking for something else or reporting that the Ubuntu package doesn't work on their distro.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
    That is unfortunate; it sucks that the cost of WONTFIXing a ticket isn't zero:\
- edflsafoiewq 5y ago
  I won't buy closed source programs with "Linux ports" anymore for this reason: it seems to always mean "some dev got it working on one Ubuntu version once". The last bug of this form I hit was a program trying to read a hardcoded path that apparently exists on Ubuntu and blissfully segfaulting if it didn't exist...

swalls 5y ago

Kudos to them. I remember reading a report from a game dev a few years ago that said basically the same thing and came to the conclusion, "... and that's why we're ending our Linux support," which utterly baffled me.

gwern 5y ago

Another example of "they'll never tell you": https://pointersgonewild.com/2019/11/02/they-might-never-tell-you-its-broken/ https://pointersgonewild.com/2019/11/02/they-might-never-tel... One thought: if merely 'being a Linux user' can enrich bug report rates by a factor of 6.5x, how many bugs are still not being reported...?

da39a3ee 5y ago

A good trick for removing unintelligent content from google search results on any general computing issue is to prefix the search terms with "linux". And I'm a Mac user :)

gizmo686 5y ago
As an Ubuntu and RHEL user, I tend to prefix my searches with "arch", for the same reason (although if you have a subscription, and your issue is with a RHEL system, RHEL is worth searching first, as they often have a bug report with resolution for your exact issue).

reginold 5y ago

When I submitted a bug to Linux distro Pop OS, it was fixed and deployed within days to all users. Can you imagine anything like that with Windows or Mac OS? We have reports how Apple silences zero day researchers instead.

johnnyanmac 5y ago
Microsoft/Appple don't have nightlies. For systems as complex as that, it can take days just to land it in some dev feature branch, let alone get into into a production branch scheduled by product managers to deploy whenever.

dbg31415 5y ago

This article does and doesn't mirror my experience. When the pandemic hit, I helped my now 15 year-old godson build a video game add-on as a way to stay close since we couldn't travel. For the last two years we've had a blast working on this together. The add-on has grown in popularity, and has a few dozen thousand users. Where I agree with the article, many of the complaints do come from Linux users. Almost without exception though, the bugs they reported were Linux-specific, or related to old-versions of the add-on that we no longer supported. A lot of times the Linux users were a release version or more behind because the emulation software they were running hadn't been updated to run the latest version of the game. They'd update the add-on, before updating the game, and then be upset when it didn't work on the slightly less than new version. Building a work around for this was a valuable lesson for my godson, in that we had to plan for the imperfect-path and make sure the add-on had a lot of edge cases baked in. Some other things I've noticed... Linux users do tend to report more bugs, but mostly because Linux users tend to be quick to anger. Customer support for Linux users... it was never pleasant. Someone would say something like, "Don't you test your shit?!" and like keep in mind this is a free add-on for a video game... and they'd be irate that we hadn't tested it on every system imaginable before releasing it. Linux users don't accept reality. Often they're aren't running the "real" instance of the game, they are running some hacked together thing running on some emulator... it's not going to be perfect. Or they were running the game on unsupported hardware that they rigged a work around for. A lot of times they'd swear the bug only came about due to our add-on, but countless hours wasted trying to appease folks like this and 99% of the time it was a bug on their end. We'd probably have had 20% more "real" dev time if we didn't ever engage with those people in the first place. Linux users tend to be more European, and there was certainly a language barrier at times. Made supporting the add-on for them worse because bug reports would come in bad-English, or German run through Google Translate to English... or just in German. There seemed to be a large number of mid-30s Germans playing a game that I'd say was aimed more for teenagers... Without sugar coating it, bug reports form those people always felt like, "Doesn't this loser have anything better to do?" Linux users do tend to be more technical, and often they have suggestions for improvement in mind. But rarely do any of them take the time to crate a PR. It was infuriating. We'd have one guy complain every week on an open ticket... we'd say, "Hey mate, we're backed up... we'll get to this when there's time. Feel free to submit a PR!" and instead he'd just paste 80% the code he wanted updated in the GitHub ticket, and then nag us every week to fix the bug. It would have been an easy enough fix, except it required us to install Linux to verify the fix. Oof. Broad ways I wish every community was better? Don't be a dick. So many of the complaints came from these man-children and every other word was a profanity. Especially on open-source projects, just understand how nice you are directly correlates to how fast your issue gets worked on. If you can fix something, don't bitch about it... just push a PR. If you push a PR, test it first. Don't assume it's on someone else to do more testing than you'd care to do. "Oh man, that would require me to do X, Y, Z... that would take hours!" Yeah, it would require anyone testing to do X, Y, Z... if you want it fixed, the fix includes testing on X, Y, Z... not just writing the code. Way more testers are needed for all open source projects, but most end users -- even the ones who can't code -- don't really want to help the project by volunteering testing time. If there's a project you like, and you can't code, you should still reach out to the creator and say, "Hey, how can I help test?"

dopu 5y ago

This is great. By the way, one of the things that has often discouraged me from filing bugs is not really knowing how to do so. Sometimes, looking at issues on github, I find people provide super structured and clean descriptions of bugs. Then there are the other kind, that the author describes: “it crashes.” Is there a standard way of describing bugs? What resources/standards have people found useful to refer to when reporting one?

tpxl 5y ago
There are a bunch of open source projects on github with issue templates. Have a look at a couple of those and pick one that suits you.

rpmisms 5y ago

I bought this game because I appreciate good devs and want to encourage linux support in gaming. This game is phenomenal, I can't stop playing. Intuitive, good UI, tons of fun. Thanks!

terafo 5y ago

It's worth noting that this game uses Godot engine, which is open source and built with Linux in mind, and most platform compatibility complexity was shifted to engine. Experience is quite different for big game developers that have their own engines and can't offload complexity to another layer of abstraction, supporting a lot of hardware/software combinations on Linux for them is quite hard. I presume that's why there are games that didn't get PC Linux releases while technically having Linux port(Cyberpunk 2077 would be prime example).

qayxc 5y ago
For most AAA titles the reason is simply 3rd-party DRM and/or Anti-Cheat not working on Linux.
- terafo 5y ago
  I'm talking about native Linux ports, not Proton compatibility. There is Linux port of Cyberpunk 2077 and we know it because there is Stadia version of game. And Linux versions of Hitman 3, Control, more than a dozen of Ubisoft games(they basically have Linux versions of all their major engines), two latest Doom games. And Denuvo DRM(which is basically only game in town right now) doesn't affect compatibility with Linux that much, DRMed games like RDR2 work just fine. Anticheats are bigger problem, but they are being dealt with. Biggest anticheat providers are now Proton compatible.
account42 5y ago
> Experience is quite different for big game developers that have their own engines and can't offload complexity to another layer of abstraction, supporting a lot of hardware/software combinations on Linux for them is quite hard. Oh but they can offload that complexity to e.g. SDL [0] As for why games like Cyberpunk 2077 are not on Linux, we can only speculate. Remember however that for a profit-focused publisher/developer the Linux port not only has to be profitable to make sense, it has to be more profitable than other things they could spend their time on. [0] http://libsdl.org/ http://libsdl.org/
- 5y ago

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

Negative feedback is insanely valuable. I write about that here:[0]. Here's what I wrote: > It can be mighty unpleasant to read negative reviews and comments about our work, but it’s worth it to do so, as long as we’re doing it to improve said work. I often say that positive affirmations feel good, but negative feedback is required to improve a product. Negative feedback, even if it’s uncouth diatribes from unpleasant people, is far more valuable than the most glowing praise (unless said “glowing praise” comes from Consumer Reports). Simply put, negative feedback is a goldmine. DON’T WASTE IT. Steel yourself. Take a belt of absinthe, if you need, and open the “Comments” section. Read everything. It sucks, doesn’t it? Is that even physically possible? Don’t you wish you were in good enough shape to do it? Do you remember your mother ever saying anything that could indicate this were true? Wait. What was that they said about the communication error report alert? [0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/the-road-most-traveled-by/#feedback https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/the-road-most-travel...

godelski 5y ago
There's another piece of advice I've heard along these lines. > Listen to the users complaining. Users are very good at identifying problems that you missed or can't see because you're too close to the project. But be careful listening to users about solutions to the problems. They can't see the whole picture. I think this is good advice. You should want to make the best product you can. Some users have good ideas and can see things you can't. But it is hard to get the signal out of the noise and this can be very frustrating.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  Agreed. Like Henry Ford is quoted as saying: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have told me 'A faster horse!'."
  - godelski 5y ago
    Yeah and it takes skill to distill what they actually want out of that comment. People don't want a faster horse, they want a faster method of transportation. This is easy to miss, especially the more technical jargon people use when explaining what they want.

cromka 5y ago

Interview with the author, mostly touching the Linux development of the game: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/05/an-interview-with-kodera-software-creator-of-the-hard-sci-fi-dv-rings-of-saturn https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/05/an-interview-with-kode...

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Timpy 5y ago

The whole thread was interesting but this comment had me cracking up: >Same experience here. Linux folks not only are our most frequent bug reporters, but they're also the best at documenting their issues and sometimes just... give us code for UI improvements?

giuliomagnifico 5y ago

Just for kidding but... do you think windows users are able to make/know what is it a bug report?

milesvp 5y ago

I'm reminded of Valve talking about supporting Linux for their half-life2 engine. Their experience was that they were able to find some fabulous engine speed up improvements that they then backported to the windows version. The common thread with supporting Linux seems to be that it's not necessarily worth it from a revenue/market size point of view, but there are all kinds of intangibles that you only get by doing cross platform development.

johnnyanmac 5y ago
At the coprorate level, intangibles don't help you move up the chain, unforuntately. I imaigne there are many well-intentioned devs that lack the choice to keep working on these things, or have to make other choices in the grand scheme of things.

brtknr 5y ago

Appreciate the old reddit url, so much more readable imo.

phendrenad2 5y ago

It's a sci-fi 2D space mining simulator. It's already going to attract the type of user who files detailed and specific bug reports. If the author made a Call of Duty clone for Linux, would they get as many great bug reports? I don't think so.

mikaalnaik 5y ago

I love that this links to the legacy reddit ui.

m0zg 5y ago

TL;DR: reason number one million why you should be using Free software whenever you can: you don't feel helpless about bugs.

LongTimeAnon 5y ago

Hrmmm. This appears to be a trend. Moving averages suggest in some short time 13% of those sales may account for 50% of the bugs. They should drop Linux support and save themselves the hassle.

deeberl 5y ago
Despite being 13% of the userbase

ksaj 5y ago

Looking at the numbers, and the fact that most of the bugs affect all OS's playing the games, the title should probably something more like "Linux users file more reliable bug reports" That's basically what's being said here, but you just know flag wavers are going to take the title to mean that Linux is more buggy.

c-smile 5y ago

It just means that Linux users are more technically savvy I would say. If you've installed and use Linux then 90% your interests are in IT / software / hardware design. So you know concept of a bug. And it is a good chance you've produced and fixed those by your own too. The best person to report a bug is a programmer really.