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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

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I sometimes try to follow the journalistic reporting way of writing. (Not the clickbait style mind you.)

So I start it off with a few brief paragraphs of text explaining what I did, what happened and what I expected to happen. Each paragraph only a couple of sentences long.

Then below that I fill in with more details.

Of course this still means that if you glance at it you still see a lot of text and may not bother reading. But my hope is that if by chance the recipient does read the first few paragraphs then it will provide the necessary motivation to either read on or to begin investigating on their own.

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

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nah, is super easy to find the Arch wiki and the install instructions, Arch users will push you hard to it so is impossible not to find it, maybe you might find some honest person though to explain the downsides too.

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

#83
post #76
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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template should have users declare what package version they're using so that you can easily tell them they're on an outdated package.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 maint…

Bug templates help, of course. But people do still just dump the wrong stuff in until the report is accepted. Like some kind of OS version in the App version field, for example. Or some ambiguous thing like "latest". Or copy/paste from an existing bug report from some other person. You can see this on many public repos.

> Like some kind of OS version in the App version field, for example.

Oh, I would be grateful for even that. Often enough, the bug template is simply deleted, the last line of the error in non-debugging mode is pasted in along with a "doesn't work"; or just "doesn't work".

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

#87
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…

I saw recently twitter complaint about emacs bug filed almost 15 years ago finally getting a wontfix responce(bug was about undo history loss or something). And then they write articles about their new and shiny bug closing process[1]. [1] https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2021/08/14/10x10/

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

#88
post #48
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…

>"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?”

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

#89
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think that's the issue though: You're seeing "Linux users" that only use Linux on their servers because they are somewhat forced to do so.

I would actually expect that almost all of those people use Windows or MacOS for their local development.

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

#90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

The bar can be as low as it wants to if it effectively filters people out. It's like how fizzbuzz is a terrible stupid test until you realize the shocking number of people who claim to be developers but can't pass it.

We would need to do a rigorous test though to see if this low bar is significant, you would have 4 groups of people

- Windows tech people(c/c++ developers) - Linux tech people(c/c++ devs and sys admins) - Arch non tech people that copy pasted instructions - any other OS or distro non tech people

then see if the Arch copy paste-rs are closer to non tech people or closer to tech people. The assumption is that since they can read instructions would create better bug reports, but is also possible they would be over -confident elitist-ic dudes that use weird packages and broke the program with their copy pasting of commands and installing garbage from AUR;

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