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Despite having just 5.8% sales, over 38% of bug reports come from the Linux community (2021) (old.reddit.com)

submitted 6 days ago by who@feddit.org to c/linux_gaming@lemmy.world

37 comments fedilink hide all child comments

For a long time, an overwhelmingly popular view among game developers and publishers has been that offering Linux builds would involve too much work, because they had either tried it briefly or heard from other devs who had tried it, and found that their problem reports massively increased. Their conclusion was often that Linux causes too many bugs to be supportable. As a gamer, I was of course disappointed every time I read this.

More importantly, as a developer, I couldn't help noticing ways in which this reasoning seemed flawed. I always felt that it was either poorly informed or not completely honest.

So, when this refreshingly different perspective from a game developer surfaced on social media, it warmed my heart. I thought the rest of you might find it interesting.

Archive.org copy

That was a few years ago. I imagine the influx of gamers using Linux since then (since it's easier now) might mean a smaller portion of our group has the technical skills described in that post, but I think it still applies. I hope it also gives us something to aspire to when interacting with the people who make the games we play.

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[–] who@feddit.org 201 points 6 days ago (21 children)

A lot of extra work for just 5.8% of extra units, right?

Wrong. Bugs exist whenever you know about them, or not.

Do you know how many of these 400 bug reports were actually platform-specific? 3. Literally only 3 things were problems that came out just on Linux. The rest of them were affecting everyone - the thing is, the Linux community is exceptionally well trained in reporting bugs. That is just the open-source way. This 5.8% of players found 38% of all the bugs that affected everyone. Just like having your own 700-person strong QA team. That was not 38% extra work for me, that was just free QA!

[+] NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip -68 points 6 days ago (20 children)

Wrong. Bugs exist whenever you know about them, or not.

In a perfect world? I fully agree.

In a world where I am limited by hours in a day and how many engineers I have on staff? A bug that nobody knows about is not a bug. That is obviously playing with fire because there is a big difference between "if you unequip and reequip a flashlight over and over it will make you invisible" and "if you mash these four numbers at once then the ATM will wipe its cameras and start spewing benjies". But for the purposes of adding new features/maintaining developer sanity? Yeah...

I dunno. This comes up a lot. I am going to ignore the circle jerk of "linux users are smarter and make better bug reports and also have bigger dicks" because... either people are slipping their hands down their pants or they know that is nonsense.

But I think it DOES ignore the reality that adding actual support for a new platform does drastically increase the testing and build/deployment overheads which are usually the realest of costs anyway. And... truth be told, I think the standard of "Don't break Proton support. Fix things as they come up" really is the best of both worlds.

[–] logi@piefed.world 35 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

A bug that nobody knows about is not a bug.

Thats not at all what's going on here. These are bugs that are affecting everyone but weren't previously being reported. The users know, even if their response is to bang their head against the keyboard, frighten the cat, and vow to never give you more money instead of filing a report.

Good bug reports are gold.

I am going to ignore...

And then you just get really weird. You OK?

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