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).
Despite having just 5.8% sales, over 38% of bug reports come from Linux
121–130 of 267 posts
Re: Despite having just 5.8% sales, over 38% of bug reports come from Linux
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't hold myself and frankly answer that my crystal ball is on scheduled maintenance today.
So when will your crystal ball be ready, could you then asap adress the issue? Also keeping spare crystal balls would be really helpful.
We are a small company supporting a free opensource product, we can't afford spare crystal balls. Even the one we have was bought on a secondary market, warranty expired in late 14th century.
Re: Despite having just 5.8% sales, over 38% of bug reports come from Linux
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I can recommend https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html
It's interesting to compare that guide "How to report bugs effectively with ESR's "How to ask questions the smart way" [1]. They both cover similar material, but the styles are extremely different. The latter is rather hostile to the reader: "If ... then you are one of the idiots we are talking about." "If you decide to come to us for help, you don't want to be one of the losers." It's also heavy on "us vs them", how we are experts and you need to treat us properly.
You know, it just occurred to me that the "How to ask questions" document is targeted as much at hackers and how they should maintain their "standards" than at users who are asking questions. For example, the document has approving examples of "logically impeccable but dismissive" hacker answers; these make more sense as instructions on how a hacker should respond than as something relevant to a user.
I guess my point is that I had read the "How to ask questions" document for decades and viewed it as an objective document, not realizing how arrogant and "gatekeeping" it is.
Re: Despite having just 5.8% sales, over 38% of bug reports come from Linux
#124Negative 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-travel...
Re: Despite having just 5.8% sales, over 38% of bug reports come from Linux
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
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://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 followe…
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Re: Despite having just 5.8% sales, over 38% of bug reports come from Linux
#126Interview with the author, mostly touching the Linux development of the game:
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2021/05/an-interview-with-kode...
Re: Despite having just 5.8% sales, over 38% of bug reports come from Linux
#127For 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…
With Pipewire and containerized distribution (eg. AppImage or god forbid, Flatpak), distributing Linux software can really be as complicated as you want it to be. Granted, audio software is still a bit confusing compared to Windows or MacOS, but with the advent of PipeWire I think most people are ready to put those days behind them.
Another alternative is to drop Linux support and let your users make a Wine installer if they really care about your software. Most VST plugins and audio software works boringly well through Wine, even scaling up to be a viable route for supporting games.
Re: Despite having just 5.8% sales, over 38% of bug reports come from Linux
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
>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 What is the value of "is competent enough to copy paste commands from a wiki?". Honestly I think the best bug reports might be because some Linux users probably understand C/C++ and can understand crash reports and error messa…
> What is the value of "is competent enough to copy paste commands from a wiki?"
Very high actually. You can tell them things like "please run in debug mode" or "please run with this command line flag" or even "please change this setting and retry". Even more basic, you can tell them to restart the game/program, or to reboot their computer, and then you can trust that they actually did it.
When dealing with a regular computer user, you can't assume any of these things.
Re: Despite having just 5.8% sales, over 38% of bug reports come from Linux
#129[deleted]
Re: Despite having just 5.8% sales, over 38% of bug reports come from Linux
#130The 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?