Because the dev gets a huge number of bug reports for bugs that were resolved 5 versions ago.
They actually asked debian to stop shipping the screensaver, because they were getting tired of saying “this is already fixed, debian is just not going to ship the fix for another year”. Debian didn’t want to stop, so the dev added the nag screen, because it was the only way to stop the flood of bug reports for things that were already fixed.
Do people not check what version of software they have and what’s newest (and if the issue exists is a good idea too) before reporting a bug?
Should they? Yes. They should also be searching for previous bug reports. I’m sure a lot of people do. But if you have enough users, even if 1% of people don’t use good reporting behaviors, you wind up with a lot of duplicate or bad reports.
There are plenty of blog posts out there that basically can be summarized as talking about how grueling open source work can be because users are often aggressive in their demands.
But this is a prime example of debian “stable” doesn’t mean “no crashes” but instead it means “unchanging, which means any bugs and crashes will remain for the whole release”
