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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

#221

Post by simion314 »

dathinab wrote: post #179
simion314 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

>So installing old packages is trivial

I don believe this is true for ANY package(like install an old KDE4 app on your KDE5 system)

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

#222

Post by jraph »

FpUser wrote: post #214
jraph wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We are sorry to read that. Please clearly describe your problem to us so we can help you. Feel free to call us on this phone number: XXX-XXX-XXX" People don't always understand our perspective, we should guide them into doing the right thing and everybody will be happy. Save your generic answer so you don't waste your time doing so, but being pedagogical should be part of our work in my opinion.

>"We are sorry to read that. Please clearly describe your problem to us so we can ..." What makes you think I do not do those things?

I don't :-)

I was speaking to everyone. Apparently I got your last sentence right.

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

#223

Post by Gigachad »

saagarjha wrote: post #218
octorian wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But not analytics that are too good, or certain people will write a lot of inflammatory articles about how your software is nothing but evil spyware. Seriously, though, having a robust and automatic crash reporting system very much helps track down bugs you're never going to get a good report on or be able to directly reproduce.

It's not really that hard to do this: ask bug reporters to attach their logs. Don't just take them preemptively "just in case".

If I asked users to attach a bug report file, most of them would complain and tell me to stop waisting their time and get the problem fixed. I have many times explained to users that I found their issue in our reporting and have not ever got a negative response.

The average user does not give two shits that you can see exactly what line of code their instance of your game crashed at. They want to play a video game and not play find the bug with you.

The vast majority of users would not even be as nice as to email you saying there was a crash. They would just immediately complain on twitter or refund the product if it wasn’t resolved without any interaction.

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

#224

Post by hyperman1 »

bedobi wrote: post #181
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.

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.

Very important to also ask: Which application. Get an URL if at all possible. If someone says 'the calendar program is down', I have at least 5 candidates, and 50/50 chance something I've never seen pops up.

Users tend to rename programs, even give them names of other programs. Our entire finance department can't wrap their heads around the fact that 'Oracle' is not a bookkeeping application. Worse, they are now convinced the new version is called 'fusion'. Oracle financials? Never heard of.

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

#225

Post by dathinab »

simion314 wrote: post #220
dathinab wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ed…

I believer you, what I dislike is those people that push everyone into Arch and omit to add the things you added. I bet that a vanilla LTS where you only update for security reason is more stable and risk free.

Tbh. I would never directly(1) recommend arch to anyone for a simple reason, it requires some linux/unix skills to be worth it.

If you have the skills I don't need to directly recommend it to you, you already know it.

If you don't know it you likely don't have the necessary skills.

Through by being opinionated about the choice of packages and way of setup and adding a QA Team, more CI and slightly delayed (non-security) updates (like 1 day or two) you probably could produce a grate experience even for casual users. Hm, but then as a company producing a custom Linux distro is rarely worth it and often special purpose enough to not care about the benefits this approach would bring.

(1): But still indirectly advertise it.

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

#226

Post by dathinab »

simion314 wrote: post #221
dathinab wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

>So installing old packages is trivial I don believe this is true for ANY package(like install an old KDE4 app on your KDE5 system)

It depends how much older.

Like just a few days, weeks or continue to use a older no longer maintained version of a package because you don't like the new version.

I (now) guess you mean the later in which case, yes it's not trivial as it's not really supported by anyone anywhere. Neither the original software developers (which replaced it with a newer version), the package maintainers/Linux distro (which also moved on as the older version doesn't get updates), other packages interacting with ti (which expect a newer version), etc.

So while it might suck, I would recommend to simply not do so as it's not worth the risk and headaches it brings you. At least not as long as you don't find enough people to do a fork and maintain that fork.

Still undoing you last update is often as simple as just installing the package from the cache, and then you would need to pin it/make pacman ignore it (and then it probably will brake sooner or later depending how much it relies on specific system libraries in specific versions being available).

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

#227

Post by franga2000 »

conductr wrote: post #204
chias wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For similar reason, I think the level of experience is probably different. Meaning those could be the same person and time is the important variable. After they’re used to developing, they better understand what useful feedback looks like.

This is actually how I got started with development. I learned how to use Linux just enough to set up WordPress (and SMB) on an old computer. This got me into PHP development (I'm recovered now) which turned out to be unbearable on Windows. I started running Linux in a VM for development, but my pathetic hardware couldn't really handle it, so I tried it on bare metal. I'm now running some flavor of Linux on my workstation, laptop and multiple servers and am exactly the sort of crazy person who will spend hours of their unpaid time compiling a detailed bug report with stack traces and all for even fully proprietary software.

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

#228

Post by saagarjha »

Gigachad wrote: post #223
saagarjha wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really that hard to do this: ask bug reporters to attach their logs. Don't just take them preemptively "just in case".

If I asked users to attach a bug report file, most of them would complain and tell me to stop waisting their time and get the problem fixed. I have many times explained to users that I found their issue in our reporting and have not ever got a negative response. The average user does not give two shits that you can see exactly what line of code their instance of your game crashed at. They want to play a video game an…

You're in a thread talking about Linux users who file good bug reports.

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

#229

Post by bmn__ »

jodrellblank wrote: post #191
kens wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Gemmell made a mistake in assuming the shame and guilt of the people who abused his article. The article is just a tool. We should hold the abusers responsible for their gatekeeping and telling others to get lost.

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

#230

Post by saagarjha »

jatone wrote: post #194
wheels wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I assume that doesn't work for closed-source software.
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