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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

#171

Post by pixl97 »

css wrote: post #101
marcodiego wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conclusion: want good testing and bug reports of your game? Support linux.

Possibly, but how many of the bugs are rare edge cases (i.e., attempting to break the game) versus problems players actually face in normal gameplay? Without knowing what priority or severity these bugs take, it is difficult to say how useful the increased volume of feedback is.

Depending on what kind of game you have, those exotic edge cases can come to be the dominant behavior in games, particularly multi-player where slight advantages can lead to some players dominating every one else.

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

#172

Post by qayxc »

croes wrote: post #43

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.

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.

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

#173

Post by Gigachad »

marcodiego wrote: post #98
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…

Conclusion: want good testing and bug reports of your game? Support linux.

Or have proper analytics. If a user emails you and says "It crashes after a few hours" rather than feeling bad for them, you ask them what their steam/game id is and you look them up in the crash reporter system and see exactly what happens rather than relying on a few programmer consumers doing the work for you.

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

#174

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

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…

> but with the advent of PipeWire I think most people are ready to put those days behind them

Maybe. On the otherhand I heard similar things about Pulse and Wayland and a decade later they're still problematic.

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

#175

Post by qayxc »

ok123456 wrote: post #118

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?"

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.

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

#176

Post by davidgerard »

dotancohen wrote: post #42
wly_cdgr wrote: post #7

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

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 decad…

> Then they changed bug trackers - twice - and all that is lost.

When precisely did this happen?

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

#177

Post by pxc »

simion314 wrote: post #32
atomicnumber3 wrote: post #19

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 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?".

For a while, NixOS had examples throughout its manual, in the installation section, which did not together form a usable installation script, or even snippets within one. If you read the prose in the manual and used the examples as examples in the context of the prose, you'd be fine. But if you blindly copied and pasted all of the example snippets, the install would not complete.

You can watch someone ‘get filtered’ here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QujRHErFG4w

The documentation has since been revised to make the examples copy-paste safe, which is a change I endorse because I see NixOS is a tool whose adoption I want to see grow and whose community I want to welcome and educate people rather than function as a super duper cool kids club whose that makes me feel special inside. But it does show how you could up the ante from the Arch case, if you really think exclusionary obscurantism is the way forward for projects you care about.

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

#178

Post by dathinab »

simion314 wrote: post #112
dathinab wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Any way the main benefit of Arch is that it's close to stable upstream repose, instead of sometimes lacking not just month but even years behind wrt. the version of libraries they ship. There is a downside that most Arch users omit intentionally, when you get latest GNOME/App with the cool new bug fixes and cool new features you also get the new not cool bugs and the new redesign/feature removal. This can cause the…

I've been using Arch since ~8 years and at least for me updates breaking stuff is rare, and every time it happens there was a simple easy work around the problem (like downgrading for a day or two at which point the bug was fixed).

Through without question a major reason why the (few) problems I did ran into haven't been a problem was due to my understanding of Linux.

The is the misconception that Arch is bleeding edge, it's not. It's the latest stable releases of the software it composed of. And at least for my use cast the amount of headache it reduces by doing so far outweighs the amount of problems I ran into (which are in my experience few, and iff you have the necessary skills normally easy to work around).

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

#179

Post by dathinab »

simion314 wrote: post #157
heywire wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been using the Arch Linux Archive as a way to stick with a known stable system for a few weeks until I have time to dedicate to a system upgrade and correcting any issues that arise.

How do you undo an app or subsystem after an update you don't like? For example I upgrade my IDE but not in place, I keep previous version just in case the new one is buggy or they again moved shit around. For my main system I am on LTS and I upgrade if there is a need and not to get high on version numbers. For example I tested new versions of kernels and video drivers and end up on what feels right for me and stopp…

Arch keeps a package cache of old packages, if you want to forever.

So installing old packages is trivial (iff you had them installed before).

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

#180

Post by def_true_false »

simion314 wrote: post #112
dathinab wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Any way the main benefit of Arch is that it's close to stable upstream repose, instead of sometimes lacking not just month but even years behind wrt. the version of libraries they ship. There is a downside that most Arch users omit intentionally, when you get latest GNOME/App with the cool new bug fixes and cool new features you also get the new not cool bugs and the new redesign/feature removal. This can cause the…

Arch probably has a lower share of GNOME users than your average distro.
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