moonpiedumplings
@moonpiedumplings@programming.dev
- Comment on Who’s responsible for bug reports on old software versions? | Perspective from a KDE Developer 1 week ago:
Package 2+ year-old frozen releases of as much upstream software as you can, and then ignore the upstreams, their bug-fix releases, and their complaints about this.
This is the worst of all worlds!
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who have to deal with users who come online to submit bug reports and complain about issues that have been fixed in a newer version of the software.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.
- Comment on LinkedIn checks for 2953 browser extensions 5 months ago:
Does the script attempt to run though? If linkedin runs this and other scripts it would explain why the site is so bloated.
- Comment on LinkedIn checks for 2953 browser extensions 5 months ago:
Does this work on firefox? Does ublock origin block this?
Is this why linkedin eats so damn much ram. It eays 300 mb for a single tab. I opened 3 linkedin tabs and it lagged my entire computer.
- Comment on Steam Deck lead reveals Valve is funding ARM compatibility of Windows games “to expand PC gaming” and release “ultraportables” in the future 7 months ago:
I understand the technical challenges with running x86 apps on arm… but multiple wrappers that do something similar to proton have already been released.
If you follow the r/emulationonandroid subreddit, they have gotten PC games working on android for a while now. One of the wrappers, gamehub, has made it to the playstore. You can just sign in to your steam account (don’t do that gamehub is sketchy af, proprietary, and by a company that stole gpl code fro, yuzu and didn’t release a derivative product), download games, and play them.
The current concern is performance, but many lower end games run just fine.
- Comment on Wayback: A Wayland replacement for the whole X11 server 1 year ago:
Cause it’s just translating to x and back to Wayland
You have a citation for this claim? I can’t find anything that backs it up.
- Comment on Wayback: A Wayland replacement for the whole X11 server 1 year ago:
Why is waypipe not the answer?
- Comment on With the Legion Go S, we can now directly compare performance between official builds of SteamOS and Windows 1 year ago:
This is only one half of the open source. Those scripts are not poweshell or bash scripts, but instead something simimar to Ansible, run through the Windows AME wizard.
Which I cannot find the source code for. Great!
I think this is the command line onlu version, but the GUI versiom appears to be closed source.
- Comment on With the Legion Go S, we can now directly compare performance between official builds of SteamOS and Windows 1 year ago:
No, this one is different. It’s not an ISO you download (those are extremely and you would be right to be skeptical of them), but instead an open source set of scripts you apply to an existing Windows OS.
- Comment on Get some quality twin-stick shooters in the latest Humble Bundle 1 year ago:
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- Comment on We’re one step closer to a global cybersecurity standard for smart home devices 2 years ago:
It’s a huge step forward to have a global consumer IoT security certification. It’s so much better than not having one,” Steve Hanna, Infineon