I wonder what percentage of the Linux users making these reports are already professional IT people in some capacity. I'm not convinced that it's "the open source way" causing this to happen, but instead suspect it's "the experienced engineer way".
While maybe not professional IT people but Linux users are quite known to be passionate about finding solutions. It's quite recent that you can have a hands off experience with Linux, it was always a tinkerer's OS before.
I remember in high school having friends who were going crazy at the chance to be the one who could solve an OS issue, like an IT medal of honor.
You could argue that these two are very closely related things.
That's exactly what I am arguing. If you have a Venn diagram of IT professionals and Linux users, I'm sure the overlap would be a lot greater than that of IT pros and Windows users. It follows that a Linux userbase is where you'd see a disproportionate number of people filing exceptional bug reports.
You reminded me about this crazy stuff where people with objdump made game 35% faster.
Holy shit, lol. I'll read that more closely later. My head's not in a space to appreciate assembly instructions right now. Somehow I'm not surprised it was Factorio people either.
They are so enlightened in optimizing processes, that they optimized factory optimization simulator.
IT professional here, can confirm, Linux is superior and my choice of os.
.... despite my work being mostly Windows Server.
Also: IT professionals usually have some experience and/or start out with Help Desk (hell), where you quickly learn what is and is not a good issue report.
Do you know any Linux users that aren't IT professionals? If I know any, it's because they're the children of IT professionals
I've been using GNU+Linux since 9th grade because that's when I got a computer. My parents have absolutely nothing to do with computers. What got me there was simple lack of understanding. I barely knew what OS was, but I needed to get one. And soon after, I misunderstood Windows as another distribution, so I went with Linux Mint.
I just had good luck.
I'm an actuarie and a Linux user at home. At work I'm forced to use excel but I do everything I can on python.
So your job is problem solving, you write code in Python, and you're a Linux user? My friend, you're one job change away from being a data scientist.
Myself. I'm just a hobbyist.
Not an IT guy, just a dude that got tired of the Windows blue screen of death back in the day and discovered Linux many years ago as an alternative. I can’t code to save my life, but I know enough to use GitHub to report bugs I encounter. It can be time consuming and tedious but when I help alert others that know how to fix the problem I’ve helped in a way that gives me a little bit of pride that I always cherish knowing I’m giving back to the community.
The kind of people that would play a game called Delta V are probably engineers or people that like technical stuff.
It probably also helps the report rise to the level of "exceptional" if the reporter understands anything about the backend. If you don't know what your even looking at its hard to explain tech specifics in detail about it.
I am not tech savvy and I had to report a bug at work for a website/program I have to use. My report was basically "X isn't working [picture of x not working]". Microsoft started asking me about my license number and something called RLS...I don't know any of that. I don't even know where to find that. I can barely Google that. I took 7 page clicks and 10 minutes just to submit the bug in the first place... My bug reports are shit because I dont know what Im looking at, an IT person probably would have included most of the info they were asking for in the original report.
If that means "row-level security" like I think it does and you're reporting a bug as an end user, it's ridiculous they'd even expect you to know that. It's not fun but when you're a programmer talking to a user, you need to ask the right questions to get at what you need to know, basically by inference, or by getting steps to reproduce the error yourself. That was not the right question. They fucked up, not you.
Software engieneering has engieneering in it, so... But also linux exposes a lot of useful stuff by default or really easy to enable.
Probably both culture and that people who use linux are literate part of humanity. Or have one in close proximity.
Thats pretty much my argument when people say "There are more bugs on Linux than Windows! Linux bad!".
No, there are not more, there are more found. There are just as many (or more) on Windows, but never found or properly reported. Which is a bad thing.
There are more bugs reported. That makes all the difference.
People used to closed source everything are trained to eat shit and find a workaround.
Hi, Micro$oft Community Advisor Alicia here!
I'm sorry to hear that your software occasionally crashes. Trying some of these steps may help you:
Please mark my post as "Answer" if this helped you solve your problem! Thank you!
Jfc every goddamn time I need to fix something on my work laptop this is the exact (and only) response I find
This is a good point and one I think explains this phenomenon well.
Linux users are more willing to report bugs because they actually get fixed. Especially when the bug report is extremely detailed.
Some time ago all the tech "news" headlines where "Linux is less secure than Windows, look at all the CVEs open !", well yes Linux has tones more CVE reported because anyone can audit the code, bugs are discovered and reported, people are informed and can put mitigations in place, unlike with Windows...
Also, statistically, a lot of Linux users are more technically minded and capable of identifying and reporting issues. This will naturally lead to higher reporting numbers, skewing stats.
I always always write strong feedback and extensive bug reporting for games. Doesn’t matter the platform. However, my daily is Linux and my daytime job is director for cloud eng and ops which is all linux distros. We write and manage massive nix fleets. Shit my career started writing and doing linux kernel work. It really made me appreciate good feedback and extensive reports on bugs.
BTW I use templeOS
Based and holy pilled
That doesn't surprise me.
Linux users are biased towards higher technical expertise, and they have a different mindset - most of the software that we use is the result of collaborative projects, and we're often encouraged to help the devs out. And while the collaborative situation might not be true for game development, the mindset leaks out.
And this is one of the reasons why we should continue buying indie games and supporting indie devs!
I've never once touched the logs button until I used linux. Over my time asking for help with anything wrong on my machine I've been asked to provide logs, replication steps, what went wrong and what's supposed to happen. This has trained me to be a good reporter and sometimes these issues help me fix them myself. Thank you Linux community for providing these skills. This isn't gaming industry specific but even with things like protonvpn, vmware, virtualbox, and stuff on Arch I use.
Part of it too is that logging on Windows is just dogshit. No one uses event viewer so it's not like the end user even knows where to look for logs, and most of the shit in there is like"lol computer crashed and idk why go fuck yourself"
Some games have such community, that it treats life as this game. For example community of certain factory optimization simulator was so enlightened, that optimized it and made 30% faster.
What a provocative anecdote!
But if too many Linux users now have a lot of games to play the development of all softwares will grind to a halt.
My only problem with reporting bugs in a game, despite knowing how to report a bug and playing a lotta games, is that I don't always have the knowledge a thing happening is a bug and not the intended design. It's not like I, as a regular every day player, have insight into what was supposed to happen that would indicate a bug.
Obviously a bug like my guy doesn't jump despite pressing the jump button is pretty easy to recognize. But how am I to know the damage calculation is fucked up when I'm not told what the formula is supposed to be?
That is still extremely valuable feedback.
"If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck."
If it looks like a duck, swims like a dog and barks like a dog but I am still telling you it is a plain old duck, there is a miscommunication between me as a game developer and you as the player.
Is something surprisingly different than elsewhere in the game? If so, it's probably a bug.
I remember when Elite Dangerous was still in beta, there was a bug where System Authority Vessels would label you a criminal upon attacking verified out-of-system bounties on the victim and attack you. So many players thought that was intended, like there was a "corrupt cop" system in the game until it was actually fixed. 🤦♂️
I really liked the idea that could be a possibility; unfortunately the fact that firing back at the "corrupt" cops just increased your bounty, which is what showed me that it wasn't intended.
Despite being just 5% of the population...
I think part of this that I'm not seeing talked about, and perhaps confused for "more tech savvy users", is just the user hostility of Windows.
9 times out of 10 when a Linux app or game crashes I get a verbose error and more often than not one that I can simply copy and paste.
9 times out of 10 when Windows, or much of windows software, crashes it gives some random number or code and in a window I can't even copy and paste out of.
My skill level doesn't change. Linux just isn't user hostile in nature making it easy to search for fixes and report issues. Where as on windows I can't summon the care or effort to manually transcribe the error so I can then do something with it.
I would report so many more bugs if there was a way to do so easily, in app, without having to create an account somewhere or signup to some website or specific forum. Give me a one-click “report bug” box and I’ll do it. BG3 did this well.
BG3 did everything well, no surprises there
Bc linux users are not only more tech literate on average, but also have more of a sense of community and shared responsibility. Yeah, if we get annoyed by something, we know we're not the only ones, and if we can't fix it ourselves, we tell the ppl who can. You don't just assume it will always be broken, or assume a future update will magically fix it.
Real nice unique looking game too. Gameplay is good but the look and feel you can tell was a lot of effort and thought and love. Definitely glad I made the purchase especially after seeing this post. Cool dev
actual BSoD on my win11 yesterday. a... bar?
One issue with developing for linux is that userspace isn't consistent between repos. Steam has solved this by vendoring all of the most commonly used libraries like zlib or whatever.
Assuming the bug is in-game then this information would definitely be useful for developers.
Edit: meant distros instead of repos
I remember a gamedev complaining about this on Twitter but the outcome he came to was that he hated that Linux users submitted bug reports, stating the OS itself was broken and he refused to help any of them.
I don't daily drive Linux anymore but it taught me to write up better bug reports
That's surprising to me. I get the vast majority of bug reports from Windows users. But I use auto generated crash reports that the user clicks OK to send and it's a music app, not a game, which might be different.
contributed a comma in some obscure Gentoo pkg to fix a compile error I had. think it was a 1 line dif. yw
Discussions and news about gaming on the GNU/Linux family of operating systems (including the Steam Deck). Potentially a $HOME away from home for disgruntled /r/linux_gaming denizens of the redditarian demesne.
This page can be subscribed to via RSS.
Original /r/linux_gaming pengwing by uoou.
No memes/shitposts/low-effort posts, please.
WWW:
Discord:
IRC:
Matrix:
Telegram:
