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.
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.
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.
This is pretty US centric thinking. Linux doesn’t have licensing. That means it’s used extensively in other countries, especially poorer ones. Some countries entire governments use it. It’s pretty huge in India too. Africa. Places where common folk, not IT professionals, use it but either have rough or no Internet and aren’t communicating in English, especially not GitHub.
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.
I think Microsoft recently introduced Python support in Excel, so maybe you can combine both.
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.
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.
Thank you, this comment made me feel a lot better that I maybe wasn’t just being flat out incompetent right out the gate. Their questions made me feel pretty stupid and I appreciate your suggesting that its somethings I might just not have been exposed too before as my job is very not tech centric.
As a developer, all I ask for is a description of what happened, what you expected, and details on your configuration (OS, browser, hardware). It would be even more awesome if you could provide a set of steps to reproduce it, but that’s not necessary.
But honestly, a bad error report is usually more useful than no error report. I’ll probably disregard it if it doesn’t have much info, but if I see a lot of similar reports, I can glean info from them to get an idea of what went wrong. But if you have the above, that can mean the difference between a fix being done really soon or me needing to wait for more info.
This matches at least my personal behaviour. I’m a programmer myself, so if a game or application has a bug I’ll instantly start thinking about what could’ve caused it and what data would be useful. It’s advantageous for me because the bug may be fixed, and (hopefully) advantageous to the Dev because they get the information they need to fix it. It doesn’t always work though. At one point I sent an entire stack trace and all kinds of debug info to an app developer. I got the response that they’d look into it, but nothing ever comes of it. I’d accept it if they just admitted that it’s not worth their time, but somehow that’s also too hard to say.
Can you get a PE license in software engineering? Serious question
Edit: PE = professional engineer.
In most parts of the United States the title “engineer” or “professional engineer” is a title with legal requirements & responsibilities in the same way calling yourself a medical doctor or lawyer would be. Folks with the credentials to be a professional engineer are tested & licensed by the state to practice engineering, similar to the way the bar or medical board would vet lawyers & doctors.
The dude certifying the structural plans for the bridge you drive over every day is in this category. Same with other categories of critical engineering from the fields of chemical, electrical, mechanical, civil, environmental, etc.
That said, TIL software “engineers” aren’t part of this group. Maybe they should be
A computer engineer is something else entirely. Basically, they often work with electrical engineers to write low level drivers or something, and rarely do much in user space. Software engineers are the opposite.
No. That’s an exam for computer hardware engineering, not software.
There used to be a software engineering PE exam, but it was discontinued in 2018 due to lack of interest.
(I regret not taking it when I had the chance.)
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:
- Go to Windows Update and search for the latest drivers
- Run ‘sfc /scannow’ in command prompt
- Reinstall Windows
Please mark my post as “Answer” if this helped you solve your problem! Thank you!
I told them I couldn’t get the Microsoft store to open and they told me to open the Microsoft store, what a bunch of morons. Ended up just reinstalling even though it was probably just a library issue.
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.
Linux users are participants. We choose purposely this OS, proactively download, install and configure it on our computers, we chose it because it’s FOSS, and we are happy to report bugs because we have the hope it will eventually get fixed for our own benefit. We all know that Linux strives because we are few (or not so few) to care about our OS and any help counts even if it’s just reporting a bug. This mindset extends to the whole FOSS ecosystem and even some proprietary SW like games ! Because we want those games to run well on Linux and therefore report bugs to developers. And this is why I love Linux and FOSS so much. It’s wonderful :)
The other thing is companies care about CVEs as they use Linux to run their critical infrastructures.
I am sure companies care about CVEs in Windows and other proprietary SW as well. They can only wish they get found, disclosed and fixed.
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
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!
