Live data from Hacker News

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

old.reddit.com

91–100 of 267 posts

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

#91
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…

I’ve often thought that game developers, esp indy studios, would benefit from doing first beta releases on Linux exclusively - wringing out a bunch of bugs, then doing a wider release.

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

#92
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…

Indeed, although my kneejerk reaction to the subject line was to expect another sad article about how it's not worth it to support Linux, this author seems very happy with the decision to do so. > Worth it? Oh, yes - at least for me. Not for the extra sales - although it’s nice. It’s worth it to get the massive feedback boost and free, hundred-people strong QA team on your side. An invaluable asset for an independent…

Maybe there's a better term to throw at this. "Even though just 5.8% of userbase, Linux users contribute 55% of helpful QA feedback"

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

#93

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 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…

There is a even simpler reason: A lot of people gaming of Linux are either software developers or system administrators. People buying a "Linux gaming system" are the rare exception, instead it's often "buy a powerful computer for use case X, and hey why not go for a slightly better/tweaked spec and also also game on it".

> buy a powerful computer for use case X, and hey why not go for a slightly better/tweaked spec and also also game on it

I'm a programmer and this is exactly what I do.

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

#94
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.

Not a lot of Windows in the shared hosting space. And what little there is tends to be more expensive, from what I have seen.

And, perhaps other than knowing about permissions, you don't really need any Linux knowledge to use these hosts.

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

#95
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.

I don't hold myself and frankly answer that my crystal ball is on scheduled maintenance today.

So when will your crystal ball be ready, could you then asap adress the issue? Also keeping spare crystal balls would be really helpful.

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

#96
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…

Just from the title, I went in expecting that percentage to be much higher, but still expected I'd get a chance to complain how report quality was not taken into account (I expected Linux users to submit better reports)!

Pleasantly surprised on all accounts :D

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

#97
This is great. By the way, one of the things that has often discouraged me from filing bugs is not really knowing how to do so. Sometimes, looking at issues on github, I find people provide super structured and clean descriptions of bugs. Then there are the other kind, that the author describes: “it crashes.”

Is there a standard way of describing bugs? What resources/standards have people found useful to refer to when reporting one?

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

#98
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.

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

#99
This article does and doesn't mirror my experience.

When the pandemic hit, I helped my now 15 year-old godson build a video game add-on as a way to stay close since we couldn't travel. For the last two years we've had a blast working on this together. The add-on has grown in popularity, and has a few dozen thousand users.

Where I agree with the article, many of the complaints do come from Linux users.

Almost without exception though, the bugs they reported were Linux-specific, or related to old-versions of the add-on that we no longer supported.

A lot of times the Linux users were a release version or more behind because the emulation software they were running hadn't been updated to run the latest version of the game. They'd update the add-on, before updating the game, and then be upset when it didn't work on the slightly less than new version. Building a work around for this was a valuable lesson for my godson, in that we had to plan for the imperfect-path and make sure the add-on had a lot of edge cases baked in.

Some other things I've noticed...

Linux users do tend to report more bugs, but mostly because Linux users tend to be quick to anger. Customer support for Linux users... it was never pleasant. Someone would say something like, "Don't you test your shit?!" and like keep in mind this is a free add-on for a video game... and they'd be irate that we hadn't tested it on every system imaginable before releasing it.

Linux users don't accept reality. Often they're aren't running the "real" instance of the game, they are running some hacked together thing running on some emulator... it's not going to be perfect. Or they were running the game on unsupported hardware that they rigged a work around for. A lot of times they'd swear the bug only came about due to our add-on, but countless hours wasted trying to appease folks like this and 99% of the time it was a bug on their end. We'd probably have had 20% more "real" dev time if we didn't ever engage with those people in the first place.

Linux users tend to be more European, and there was certainly a language barrier at times. Made supporting the add-on for them worse because bug reports would come in bad-English, or German run through Google Translate to English... or just in German. There seemed to be a large number of mid-30s Germans playing a game that I'd say was aimed more for teenagers... Without sugar coating it, bug reports form those people always felt like, "Doesn't this loser have anything better to do?"

Linux users do tend to be more technical, and often they have suggestions for improvement in mind. But rarely do any of them take the time to crate a PR. It was infuriating. We'd have one guy complain every week on an open ticket... we'd say, "Hey mate, we're backed up... we'll get to this when there's time. Feel free to submit a PR!" and instead he'd just paste 80% the code he wanted updated in the GitHub ticket, and then nag us every week to fix the bug. It would have been an easy enough fix, except it required us to install Linux to verify the fix. Oof.

Broad ways I wish every community was better?

Don't be a dick. So many of the complaints came from these man-children and every other word was a profanity. Especially on open-source projects, just understand how nice you are directly correlates to how fast your issue gets worked on.

If you can fix something, don't bitch about it... just push a PR.

If you push a PR, test it first. Don't assume it's on someone else to do more testing than you'd care to do. "Oh man, that would require me to do X, Y, Z... that would take hours!" Yeah, it would require anyone testing to do X, Y, Z... if you want it fixed, the fix includes testing on X, Y, Z... not just writing the code. Way more testers are needed for all open source projects, but most end users -- even the ones who can't code -- don't really want to help the project by volunteering testing time. If there's a project you like, and you can't code, you should still reach out to the creator and say, "Hey, how can I help test?"

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

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN