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

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

#131

Post by wheels »

smoldesu wrote: post #127
wheels wrote: post #35

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…

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…

Yes, it is a VST plugin (and standalone), and amusingly probably works better in Wine than Native, aside from the fonts being craptastic. Containerized distribution doesn't really work for plug-ins.

This is the first time I'm reading of Pipewire, and it sounds promising, but will need to have host support before it becomes a reasonable VST / LADSPA replacement. (I didn't see if that's among its goals, but such would seem reasonable.)

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

#133

Post by milesvp »

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.

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

#134

Post by b0rsuk »

cs702 wrote: post #21

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 rep…

This was my hunch, and I just wanted it to be true. I'm very pleased it turned out to be that way.

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

#135

Post by wheels »

edflsafoiewq wrote: post #108
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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...

What you may be missing is that that comes from necessity -- again, for an app like ours, 1% of our users are on Linux. Producing packages for Ubuntu along takes about as much time as producing for Windows and macOS, where almost all of our users are.

Testing and packaging for, say, the top 5 distros would get the effort-per-user to an even crazier extreme -- we'd literally be at the point that supporting a user on Linux takes 200 times more effort than supporting a user on Windows. You either need a very large number of users, or a very large value per use for that to make sense.

For non-OSS projects, most of the time the smart decision is just not to support Linux. I've worked at other pro-audio companies, and they had Linux versions internally that they didn't release because of the support costs.

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

#136

Post by tyingq »

grawprog wrote: post #113
mAritz wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's the issue though: You're seeing "Linux users" that only use Linux on their servers because they are somewhat forced to do so. I would actually expect that almost all of those people use Windows or MacOS for their local development.

And those hosts often are not using up to date packages and don't even have up to date security fixes at times. I recently moved a wordpress site I was working on from a local dev setup onto a live bluehost server and was immediately hit with a bunch of out of date package warnings. As the customer was using some cheap shared hosting service, there wasn't much I could really do about it.

That's sort of funny, as one of the remaining few value pitches for something like Bluehost (versus a $5/month vps) is "somebody else does apt-get update && apt-get upgrade for you".

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

#137

Post by toomanybeersies »

drdrey wrote: post #38
elliekelly wrote: post #25

Earlier 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.

Use this template: 1. When I do this 2. Here is what I expect to happen 3. But instead, this happens

Ugh no thanks, I'll just send them a screenshot and say "it's broken, please fix this!"

If it's good enough for my colleagues to submit tickets like this, it's good enough for me!

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

#138

Post by simion314 »

Noughmad wrote: post #128
simion314 wrote: post #32

Earlier 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 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…

From my real world experience on making desktop apps you want to get all the bug reports from all users, so you need to make it "1 click", This means add a menu /button to submit a bug report, then you popup a form where user fills stuff, you also send the log file where you collected info live OS version and other useful stuff plus the crash logs).

Same if you need to have the user run in debug mode you make it 1 click to enable/disable debug mode, usually though developers don't work directly with customers so then they don't put the effort to streamline the collection of quality bug reports.

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

#139

Post by NullPrefix »

dathinab wrote: post #78
dotancohen wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is the value of "is competent enough to copy paste commands from a wiki?". Because without that filter you are getting feedback from, at best, people who cannot even copy paste commands from a wiki.

You might be surprised how many people are out there which can't even read a wiki close enough to follow instructions in it. Plus in my experience a lot of Arch users don't just "copy past instructions" they also somewhat understand why this instructions are needed, the Arch Wiki is grate as a resource for setting up things when you understand what you do, but it's often terrible when you just want a step by step gui…

Arch Wiki is so great enough that even users of distros other than Arch read it.
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