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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

#161

Post by westurner »

elliekelly wrote: post #25
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…

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.

From "Post-surgical deaths in Scotland drop by a third, attributed to a checklist" https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-19684376 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19686470 :

> GitHub and GitLab support task checklists in Markdown and also project boards [...]

> GitHub and GitLab support (multiple) Issue and Pull Request templates:

> Default: /.github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE.md || Configure in web interface

> /.github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE/Name.md || /.gitlab/issue_templates/Name.md

> Default: /.github/PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE.md || Configure in web interface

> /.github/PULL_REQUEST_TEMPLATE/Name.md || /.gitlab/merge_request_templates/Name.md

> There are template templates in awesome-github-templates [1] and checklist template templates in github-issue-templates [2].

> [1] https://github.com/devspace/awesome-github-templates

> [2] https://github.com/stevemao/github-issue-templates

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

#162

Post by godelski »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #160
godelski wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

Agreed. Like Henry Ford is quoted as saying: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have told me 'A faster horse!'."

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.

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

#163

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

wheels wrote: post #74
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.

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.

That is unfortunate; it sucks that the cost of WONTFIXing a ticket isn't zero:\

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

#164

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

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...

I mean, "Linux" isn't enough to target, and in all fairness, if they say it's for Ubuntu then that's what they support. One would hope that they do say they're targeting Ubuntu, of course.

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

#165

Post by woolion »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #54
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…

The worst part? I've seen developers and companies actually complain about this. Just 6% of sales yet look at the huge amount of work they cause us!

This is the case with people selling business software, meaning bugs would mean wrong accounting or worse outcomes for the customers. Yet all layers in the company would treat these reports as an annoyance.

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

#166

Post by ghostwriter »

dylan604 wrote: post #115
whateveracct wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huge amount of work they do for us

Marketing/PR depts never see it that way. They open up new tickets, and that's the metric they care about. Not justifying it, but marketing depts rarely get it right.

Marketing of Facebook was of no use when Facebook was laying flat not so long ago. It shows which department should really have a definitive voice in product metrics.

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

#167

Post by B1FF_PSUVM »

LambdaComplex wrote: post #143
_dain_ wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, that "how to ask questions the smart way" article always left a bad taste in my mouth. Perhaps there should be a "how to answer questions" companion piece.

esr seems to have a pretty big ego, just based on his writings. (e.g. at one point he declared that he can tell if someone is smart or not just by looking at them)

Strange, he's old enough to have watched the first TV run of Lt. Columbo ...

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

#168

Post by fao_ »

LambdaComplex wrote: post #143
_dain_ wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, that "how to ask questions the smart way" article always left a bad taste in my mouth. Perhaps there should be a "how to answer questions" companion piece.

esr seems to have a pretty big ego, just based on his writings. (e.g. at one point he declared that he can tell if someone is smart or not just by looking at them)

He actually at one point wrote that he was a reincarnation of the god Pan, so he has/had a very literal god complex, too. It's such a shame that he was the person to interpret hacker culture for those of us in the future, because he's hardly a good lens

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

#169

Post by qayxc »

terafo wrote: post #121

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 th…

For most AAA titles the reason is simply 3rd-party DRM and/or Anti-Cheat not working on Linux.

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

#170

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

thrwyoilarticle wrote: post #20

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 tr…

> On the other hand, a Windows user is trained not to report bugs

Decades of dealing with open source projects hasn't been much better in my experience. I don't usually bother to submit bug reports because my experience is that they'll be ignored for a few years and then closed unceremoniously.

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