Comment by dbg31415
5 years ago
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?"
That sounds a lot like badly managed support TBH. Complaint about having to install Linux to check fix indicates that you weren't even trying to run build on Linux before releasing it, I'm not sure why were you supporting Linux at all with that kind of attitude. And I presume that vanilla game doesn't have common way to install mods and Linux version is non-existent.
>I'm not sure why were you supporting Linux at all with that kind of attitude.
it's a free add-on made alongside a 15 year old for bonding purposes. For all we know, it wasn't. And I don't think they have a duty to provide any labor that goes beyond their bonding to ensure this, let alone be yelled at for it.
Correct, we never set out to run a software company... just build something my godson found fun. Figured since he was interested, he'd be motivated and he'd learn a lot along the way. A lot of what he's learnt has been social skills... not programming skills. But there was no intended support for Linux, he's 15... like he finds it fun to build things, and I'm doing the best I can to limit the tedious "edge cases" so he stays motivated to be a dev later in life.
>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.
that's always the worst. If they paid some money for this, then I can understand some anger in their investment. Here, it's literally goodwill providing this tool the complainer chose not to make themselves and they instead throw a fit like the world owes them this free labor.
I don't like using this retort, but this is exactly what the "why don't you make your own steak" sorts of replies are for.