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Comment by dEnigma | Hacker News Reader

I also spent quite a lot of time during the Windows 10 preview phase, and a while after release, diligently reporting bugs, and voting on well thought-out feature requests. But after noticing that none of these bugs ever got any attention, and how the Feedback Hub was mostly just noise, I started to wonder why I even did free work for a multi-billion dollar company, on my own time. Right around that period I switched to Linux and now only use Windows for some games that absolutely won't work on the former. This way I no longer care how bad the UX of the system is, and how many bugs there are, as long as my games launch.

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Just want to say that the time you spend reporting bugs on Linux environments is not in vain but much appreciated. I try to give back to the community and spend time fixing issues people have for the Linux desktops MATE and XFCE, at least a few times a year.

Giving back to the Linux ecosystem is definitely much more enjoyable than reporting Windows bugs. I'm active building packages and reporting/fixing bugs for Solus, as well as contributing some code to a variety of projects from time to time. It's more of a relaxing pastime for me than a chore. Also you mostly are in direct contact with the actual developers of the apps/libraries, which is a huge improvement.

>> It's more of a relaxing pastime for me than a chore.

This is how a lot of software should be developed. Time to reflect and think about how to make things better. Not some weird money and authority driven scheme.

Really? FOSS software very often has the same problems in this regard that Microsoft does. Almost every time I have an issue with something I will find it already in their bug tracker, several years old, at best ignored and at worst closed by the stale bot.

In my estimation it is roughly the same as it is with Microsoft: if it doesn't directly affect a developer's workflow it will not be fixed and they're annoyed you even brought it up.

The big difference of course being that Microsoft expects you to pay money for this treatment.

You can’t paint all projects with the same brush as how they are run can vary widely from one to another.

I'm sorry, but where did I say 'all FOSS software'?

That's depends on the specific software and maintainer. I see stuff in the GNOME tracker that boil my blood, I become angry even when now, thinking about it.

On the other hand, I had filled bug regarding some encryption functionality and was given useful and respectful comments that helped me with the non-bug but user error issue. I also reported on some power management feature I was missing and got it implemented in merely few weeks. This two are from fedora maintainers, but I also had some unknown dev on github to implement additional auth options in his product per my request, got this delivered on very short time and could proceed to do POC of the product for a customer.

> That's depends on the specific software and maintainer.

Something so obvious I didn't feel the need to explicitly state it in my post. I guess I should know better.

The point might be obvious but I wanted to highlight some non-obvious experiences I had.

It's hardly a salient detail when we're talking about... checks notes thousands of distinct software projects with their own unique leadership models. Much like the parent said, there are indeed pretty notoriously ignorant dev teams out there like the GNOME and Flatpak maintainers, but they're more the exception than the rule. By and large, I'd argue that the Linux community gets stuff right more often than Microsoft does these days, and probably Apple too (though their software these days isn't exactly a high bar).

> I see stuff in the GNOME tracker that boil my blood, I become angry even when now, thinking about it.

Here's one affecting me recently, When the app on another workspace is closed and the workspace is switched, it crashes GNOME shell. I found that there have been several bug reports raised regarding issue[1].

The oldest related bug report was opened in upstream Ubuntu launchpad a year ago. Granted this is relatively small period compared to some other bugs.

Yet this bug affects me regularly(I guess it has to do with trackpad) and no workspace until it can be fixed. So I'm planning to create a debugging setup to contribute towards resolving this issue.

[1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/4801

Are there any Linux desktops that don't require you to sign up for an account to submit a crash report, and keep crash report details private until triage? That has kept me from reporting reproducible bugs in KDE apps before.

Tip: Use your distribution’s bug reporting system, not the upstream’s. For example, in Debian, simply run the “reportbug” command. It is then the maintainer’s job to, if appropriate, forward the bug upstream.

Whenever a game I play is released on the Nintendo Switch, I am a little bit happier (eg Diablo 3, Tetris Effect). There’s honestly nothing keeping me in Windows except for video games (which I have less and less time for each year). I’m sort of looking forward to the day I won’t need to play video games on Windows and just be happy with a MacBook and a Linux workstation.

You might be interested in a Valve Steamdeck, it's a Switch form factor Linux gaming device.

https://www.steamdeck.com/

Plus you can play on Steam on GNU/Linux so you're not restricted to Windows. It's pretty much the same runtime that's gonna land on the Steam Deck. I play some pretty demanding games and it runs flawless. While technically it does not require discrete graphics hardware, in practice it does, but its been smooth sailing with my somewhat old NVIDIA GTX1060 GPU.

I'm the same. My drive doesn't have enough space so I'm stuck using WSL2 for React/Node development, and I'm waiting for an unreleased game to see how it will perform on Linux before I make my permanent switch.

Every other game I play is on Steam and have decent Proton support, or is a retro game where I can use Retroarch and PCSX2 natively.

> My drive doesn't have enough space

The recommendation here is to buy a larger drive (and a usb->sata adapter if necessary), clone to the new drive, and keep the old one as an offline backup!

You could install a debian bullseye into the NTFS filesystem alongside with windows, and use the NTFS FS as your root filesystem. That has been possible for a while, but had performance caveats due to the use of fuse-ntfs. There are a some guides on the interwebs. Since Linux 5.15 there is the new ntfs3 driver in the kernel, that has much better performance. 5.15 is easily installable from the testing repo into a normal bullseye.

Sure, because Nintendo is such a great example of openness towards FOSS communities.

Is it sarcasm, or they are really open to FOSS communities, pjmlp? Tone deaf reader here.

It is sarcasm. Nintendo is extremely hostile towards perceived infringements on their IP, and go out of their way to make modding and fan content difficult to use.

Sarcasm, as if switching from Microsoft to Nintendo was any better.

Nintendo is notoriously litigious and hyper-sensitive to IP infringement. It's a real shame considering the cultural impact their games have had.

Nintendo is super trigger happy when it comes to suing modders and homebrew. But at the same time they are extremely friendly towards the indie developers that they work with.

So they hate people publicly distributing an open source switch SDK, but they'll happily give it to you (including full source) after you sign their NDA.

Me, too. I'm so happy if a newly purchased game "just works". It feels like Windows by now is deliberately wasting my time with updates and unexpected configuration changes.

Welcome to the dark side. I’m sure (almost) every bug you report will be appreciated here.

> Welcome to the dark side

Linux to me is the "light" side.

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