Who’s responsible for bug reports on old software versions? | Perspective from a KDE Developer
Submitted 5 days ago by sanitation@lemmy.today to linux@sh.itjust.works
https://pointieststick.com/2026/07/19/whos-responsible-for-bug-reports-on-old-software-versions/
moonpiedumplings@programming.dev 5 days ago
I disagree.
Have you ever helped a non tech nerd use a computer? They don’t really understand how it works. Instead, they just have a workflow, a set of steps they follow to send an email or get to facebook. When those steps break, they panic, throwing up hands.
I once helped someone who got stuck, where the issue was that outlook had been set to sort emails by file size, rather than date. Outlook (new) and other constant changes by Microsoft have been a nightmare. When a new bug is introduced in the middle of an existing workflow, everything falls apart because they are unable to find a workaround.
Stable distros, the ones that freeze 2+ year old packages are built for people like those. People who use workflows, rather than computers. These users will also never, ever submit a bug report. They will never go online to annoy developers. They might not even know what a “bug” is. These users unknowingly appreciate it when package versions are frozen, when nothing is moved, and even when no bugs is fixed, because it means their workflows will never need to change. And by the time of the next stable distro release, I would have ample time to prepare and draft up new workflows for them.8
Unfortunately I have to support people who use Windows because we are locked in to the ecosystem everywhere. But I’ve come to respect the stable distro model, and I really wish I could be supporting those distros instead of Windows.
I understand the frustration of the author, and other developers who have to deal with users who come online to submit bug reports and complain about issues that have been fixed in a newer version of the software. But I dislike takes like this, because it’s a form of nonresponse bias in your polling. You are only listening to the people speaking up, and viewing them as your entire community, without understanding that there are vastly more people who are just silent about this.
Ubuntu continues to dominate the Linux desktop marketshare (overall, stats from Steam are different). But you don’t hear anything about it online, because the vast majority of people who use Ubuntu, just… use it. It works for them. They don’t go online to tinker further, or to praise it, or to complain.
I like Arch Linux. I love receiving new features. But it has new bugs every week. One time dragging bookmarks into firefox’s bookmark bar caused a crash. Another time it was KDE issues. I can and do quickly find workarounds, and then the bugs get fixed and I handle the new bugs. But a normal user can’t do that.
My opinion is that if a user is reporting bugs to developers or complaining about older package versions, they should just switch to a distro with newer packages, preferably a rolling release. Those kind of users are probably able to do the above, able to cope with the unstability of the system. It doesn’t mean unreliable, as the system is reliable and works overall, but my workflows are constantly adjusted in minor ways, to work around minor issues or for efficiency gains. I recommended a user frustrated with older packages to do that in another comment.
Users of say, Arch Linux, or Nixos, tend to like tinkering, which often leads to needing help, which results in joining discussions, causing them to be overrepresented. But, we are not the majority of Linux users, according to last year’s stackoverflow survey. We are somewhat of a loud minority.
I understand the frustration of developers dealing with distros like Ubuntu, Red Hat, or Debian, due to their slow moving policy, and perspective of stability as being relaxed about even fixing bugs. But these distros have their place in our society, and they have a real purpose behind these policies.