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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

#191

Post by jodrellblank »

kens wrote: post #123
ArloL wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The https://WhatHaveYouTried.com guy backtracked after a few years in the linked follow-up article, ashamed of giving the geek world another way to gatekeep and tell unworthy people to get lost.

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

#192

Post by tapland »

chias wrote: post #110
tyingq wrote: post #16

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/l…

I think the difference is: With a game that supports Linux, you get people who have chosen to run Linux instead of Windows because they prefer it. They have also worked enough with their system to get their Linux system capable of running games well, which may not be trivial for the given distro. With a Wordpress plugin or whatever, you get people who are running Linux because they "have" to. Trying not to sound "tru…

Yes, you get users who have linux as their 'daily driver', as opposed to those to dabble in it a bit on the side :)

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

#193

Post by bedobi »

rnotaro wrote: post #183
bedobi wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a dev, I think STEPS TO REPRODUCE Open foo click bar EXPECTED RESULT saves bar ACTUAL RESULT crashes with error x912344 MISC is the best. It gives just the right amount of detail to get started, in a good, actionable format.

Yeah, that was basically most of the bug template we were filling when I used to work QA at Warner Bros. Games. Summary : Steps to reproduce : Expected result : Actual result : Build/Version : And a few more fields about platform, severity, etc. on Jira.

Lucky you to have that standard enforced within the org! We don't so I pretty much invariably have to respond to "bug reports" ("foo doesn't work pls help") with "can you please format your bug report like this?" haha

Out of curiosity, what does deving for Warner Bros mean? Like working on their internal systems and stuff? Netflix integrations or something? Sounds cool, bet you get to see movies before they come out too!

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

#194

Post by jatone »

wheels wrote: post #135
edflsafoiewq wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 L…

have you thought about offloading that work to the distributions themselves? I'd be curious to see what say ubuntu would charge for them maintaining your packages for you. you just need to provide a tarball to them.

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

#195

Post by FpUser »

aendruk wrote: post #88
FpUser wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"we have all seen bug reports like: “it crashes for me after a few hours" Here is a gem from my collection of user "bug reports". The email with this exact words and nothing else - "something is wrong, what do I do?". I was biting my fingers trying not to reply with the first thing that came into my head.

Interpreted literally it’s a reasonable question: “What process should I follow when I encounter a problem?”

Well try to visit car repair shop and ask the same question as in the original email and then explain them what you really meant.

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

#197

Post by rpmisms »

simion314 wrote: post #77
rpmisms wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm assuming you don't generally do front-end work, because many many users are complete [insert PC word for zero capacity for rational thought].

I do interact with customers, but I would rather get a bug report from a Kubuntu users that knows the difference between a compiler and a linker then from a 12 years old that managed to copy paste instructions into a command prompt.

And I would rather have either of those than a bug report from anyone I've had to teach to use a browser.

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

#198

Post by maccolgan »

gpm wrote: post #10
Procedural wrote: post #3

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.

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 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…

Does whatever work on Android too? Because that's technically Linux, that's what I believe GP was referring to. I believe Android actually has a totally different graphics stack.

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

#199

Post by mr_toad »

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…

And when you can find a bug reporting channel the issue gets answered by an ‘MVP’, usually with some sort of inapplicable canned response, and then closed as ‘fixed’, without actually addressing the problem.

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

#200

Post by Aeolun »

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 depts rarely get it right.

Depends on whether you feel selling people stuff they don’t need is ‘not right’.

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