Comment by AdmiralAsshat
5 years ago
Glad to see that it was a positive view of the Linux bug reporters, rather than "Bah, I spend all my time fixing packaging issues from entitled Linux users who scream at me that the game doesn't work with their obscure, home-spun distro."
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 well enough to result in a bootable system" results in a community with a base level of competence, care, and patience that puts it at least two standard deviations above the other distros and at least four (I know how small the percentile is now) above just the general wash of garbage that you get when you Google for Windows issues.
It creates similar effects to the different credit card companies. Why would anyone accept Amex and its higher fees? Because they bring you higher value customers, sometimes dramatically higher value.
>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 messages because they understand the system.
Because without that filter you are getting feedback from, at best, people who cannot even copy paste commands from a wiki.
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> What is the value of "is competent enough to copy paste commands from a wiki?"
Very high actually. You can tell them things like "please run in debug mode" or "please run with this command line flag" or even "please change this setting and retry". Even more basic, you can tell them to restart the game/program, or to reboot their computer, and then you can trust that they actually did it.
When dealing with a regular computer user, you can't assume any of these things.
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> What is the value of "is competent enough to copy paste commands from a wiki?".
For a while, NixOS had examples throughout its manual, in the installation section, which did not together form a usable installation script, or even snippets within one. If you read the prose in the manual and used the examples as examples in the context of the prose, you'd be fine. But if you blindly copied and pasted all of the example snippets, the install would not complete.
You can watch someone ‘get filtered’ here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QujRHErFG4w
The documentation has since been revised to make the examples copy-paste safe, which is a change I endorse because I see NixOS is a tool whose adoption I want to see grow and whose community I want to welcome and educate people rather than function as a super duper cool kids club whose that makes me feel special inside. But it does show how you could up the ante from the Arch case, if you really think exclusionary obscurantism is the way forward for projects you care about.
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".
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> Why would anyone accept Amex and its higher fees? Because they bring you higher value customers, sometimes dramatically higher value.
Why are Amex customers higher value? Is it because they're typically business cards rather than personal?
> Why are Amex customers higher value? Is it because they're typically business cards rather than personal?
That's probably a part of it, but the real answer is because an Amex is a charge card, not a credit card, which means that whatever is spent on it MUST be paid off in full at the next billing cycle. The net effect of this, is that if your customers are shopping with an Amex, they're people who /have/ money, or in the case of business cards they are acting on behalf of an organization that has money. Without writing an expository essay, it seems to be simply true that those who are more affluent also have networks and can bring people by word of mouth if you meet their expectations.
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WSL is somewhat similar in that installing it was harder than installing most other things on Windows. They've made it easier in Windows 11, and will probably continue that direction. I wonder if MS knows where that leads for them.
You can literally just do `wsl.exe --install` on the newest builds of Windows 10 and it enables the hypervisor feature and downloads Ubuntu in one command. AFAIK it's the same in Windows 11 (I'm still on 10 and don't plan on upgrading for a few years at least).
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TBH, as a non-ubuntu (gentoo) user, i'm pretty sure, that all the packaging isues (for non-gentoo packages) are something that I, personally have to deal with, and not bother the original developer with.