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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

#61

Post by wott »

voakbasda wrote: post #12
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

Knowing a bug will be investigated would be enough, never mind fixed. Sadly I would assert that the vast majority of open source projects do not bother to respond to reports or even patches. The result of being ignored enough times is that I have become much less motivated to report bugs on projects that might actually care, unless there is clear and present evidence (openly available) that their issue tracker is suf…

I had much better results with one-man projects, than with projects which have a small army of volunteers and/or of paid employees. In the later case, it feels exactly the same as when I try to get in touch with the various administrations in my area, meaning that I can achieve a similar result by printing my missive, setting it on fire and dancing around it naked.

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

#62

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

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…

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.

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

#63

Post by matheusmoreira »

simion314 wrote: post #47
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.

That is still a pathetic filter , "I know to read and I know to copy paste", I still believer that the good reports are not from the copy-paste ,I run Arch to be cool group but from technical people that run Linux(any distro).

> I know to read and I know to copy paste

You'd be surprised. I've seen many arrogant users try to install Arch and fail because they were literally incapable of reading and understanding the simple instructions written on the Arch Wiki. Even technical users of other distributions. Sometimes they use an installer and manage to get a working system with no effort... Only for it to stop working because they failed to read the news and some update required manual intervention. If I remember correctly, users are required to provide pacman output as a form of CAPTCHA in order to create an Arch Wiki account. They must prove they installed Arch in order to edit the wiki.

A certain degree of elitism is great, no matter the community. Arch Linux users are expected to be responsible for their own systems, it's expected that they will take care of it and maintain it. People who can't or won't do this are better off using something else.

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

#64

Post by gwern »

Another example of "they'll never tell you": https://pointersgonewild.com/2019/11/02/they-might-never-tel...

One thought: if merely 'being a Linux user' can enrich bug report rates by a factor of 6.5x, how many bugs are still not being reported...?

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

#65

Post by tyingq »

5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #53
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…

Most of the Wordpress developers I know are Windows users. (I don't know too many of them, but still.)

That's interesting. Most of the WP devs I encountered are deploying on old-school shared Linux hosting, like BlueHost, GoDaddy, etc. Maybe some use Windows for local dev stuff, but I doubt many deploy their "prod" there.

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

#66

Post by whateveracct »

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!

Huge amount of work they do for us

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

#67

Post by yeetaccount »

simion314 wrote: post #47
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.

That is still a pathetic filter , "I know to read and I know to copy paste", I still believer that the good reports are not from the copy-paste ,I run Arch to be cool group but from technical people that run Linux(any distro).

For someone to find the wiki, read it and then attempt to solve their problem in a rudimentary fashion gets you towards the tail end of the bell curve. They might even follow up with you if you have questions.

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

#68

Post by terafo »

simion314 wrote: post #47
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.

That is still a pathetic filter , "I know to read and I know to copy paste", I still believer that the good reports are not from the copy-paste ,I run Arch to be cool group but from technical people that run Linux(any distro).

Yet, something like 95% of all desktop users can't do that. You, presumably, disproportionally interact with tech people. Typical office worker might encounter problem that requires terminal once in a year at which point sysadmin is called. And it`s not only about reading and copy pasting it's about ability to devote pretty large amount of attention to a task.

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

#69

Post by ajvs »

oefrha wrote: post #31
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…

In addition, in my experience maintaining a developer tool, an outsized source of bug reports is Linux users reporting already fixed issues in their outdated distro packages, or even problems introduced by their packager (e.g. flatpak/snap permission problems). And they typically won’t identify the version despite clear instructions in the issue template asking for the debug output containing everything I need, inclu…

Don't blame the user here - your bug reporting template should have users declare what package version they're using so that you can easily tell them they're on an outdated package. Flatpak is usually a boon in this regard since you can ensure your users are all on the latest packages, though you're making the tradeoff of having to deal with any Flatpak-specific bugs (which I'd say is a decent tradeoff for solo maintainers).

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

#70

Post by edflsafoiewq »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #56
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.

bug reports and communication in general: If you've got a good summary/abstract more detail is always better. I don't know if I've ever had to talk to someone on my team about how they "over communicated" (not the same as TMI!). Make the receiver responsible for saying "OK, that's enough, got it!"

Conversely I think you should generally write the smallest amount of text you can. It maximizes the chance someone else will actually read it.
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