Or maybe if you are QA, in this case, filing proper bug reports is literally your job.
But "regular" power users who have no experience in development work (I actually mean work, not just knowing how to code) simply may not have the skills, because yes, writing bug reports is a skill, the kind of skill that takes actual learning and practice, that not that many people have, and that can get you a job if you are good enough at it.
From my time working in shared platform technologies and open source I beg to differ. The fact that someone is a developer does not mean they'll make a quality bug report. There's probably something else about Linux that makes the self-selection clearer or increases the ease of generating quality bug reports.
The other part is culture. Linux users are used to having access to bug trackers where they can get responses from actual developers of the software in question. Not that this means you will always get your issue fixed or are even guaranteed a response but IMO the experience is much better than having to dig through a help desk that only answers trivial things that any competent user can figure out on their own before being allowed to interact with a corporate support drone who can't do anything except repeat scripted answers. The latter is just so demotivating that if you have go through it enough end up not bothering in the future even if some developers might have better systems in place.
Being used to having access to developers also encourages you to make good bug reports because those will often get you a fix quickly. E.g. I have had cases where it took only a few hours from a bug report with a game trace reproducing the issue to a working graphics driver patch.
Lastly, actual bug trackers - as opposed to bug black holes like support systems where you don't see other people's reports or bug report forums that quikcly become a mess of already resolved issues and duplicates - provide an opportunity for the users (especially powerusers) to help each other out by sharing details to narrow down the bug as well as workarounds. All of that also makes the bug reports more useful for any dev looking at fixing the issue.
Would you include the time and date? The names of the roads? The sequence that the lights follow? The length of time of each signal? The max length of cars at each signal during the sequence? Generally attempting to provide what the person who might receive such a bug report would need?
Tell me, what qualities are actually required to communicate the details of a system deemed to be operating incorrectly? Perhaps empathy, gumption and intelligence, that is, qualities that are not limited to those experienced with moving Jira tickets to the right?
These qualities are what you would consider to be "technical understanding". Most people don't have these qualities, unfortunately. Not because they aren't _capable_ of obtaining them, but because they don't care to want to.
Should doctors think it’s sad when you don’t know enough about your body to self diagnose?
What about legal disputes? You are a power user of society and you still need to hire a lawyer to navigate its laws?
I disagree pretty strongly with this. I think Millennials were kind of the sweet spot in technical literacy. They grew up in a time when they still needed to understand computers, and tinkered around with them a lot out of necessity (computer viruses all the time, Napster/Limewire, etc..). They also saw the start of the internet and cell phones becoming ubiquitous, which provided a lot of forced-learning opportunities.
Gen Z'ers, in my experience, have had almost no computer experience. They are great at using the apps on their phones, but phones have become so polished and easy from an end user perspective that they haven't done any tinkering. They've often never downloaded an mp3 file, torrent, fixed internet issues, etc.. because things just work now. Obviously there are exceptions to this, and really technical Gen Z'ers (like with every generation). But in my experience, that isn't the norm.
The hacker mindset just doesn't seem to be present in Gen Z like it was for Millenials and some Gen Xers. We took crap apart as kids to see how it worked, and we could still. Now things are so integrated and miniaturized, it's much harder to do that.
Add on top of that how Gen Z is almost all iPhone users and actually looks down on Android (the platform where you can dig in if you want to), it's no wonder the default is only an inch deep. Their tech providers and advisors have been telling them their whole lives how scary the world outside of the walled garden is and putting technical controls in their way to prevent them should they decide they want to.
We absolutely could have had the Gen Z that is more technical than Millenials, but we ruined it. It's not their fault, any generation raised like them would have been the same way.
Side note: If you're a Gen Z hacker (of which I've known a few and they are super impressive), I consider you a gentleperson and a scholar.
I don’t get the complaint, as a dev myself. Everything being easy and just working is what we intended for. The future! It’s here.
The problem being that if it doesn't just work, people just shut down.
To me it's almost a double edged sword. If I have to make something work, I learn about how it works, and I can solve problems if they happen.
If it just works, it's magic, and I have no idea why the magic stopped.
Don’t get me wrong, it also hurts me that I need to install an app to ssh to my server on my iPhone. Or when I can’t have a long-running process in the background. Or when I can’t automate things with shell scripts. It really does hurt. But this appliance form is really how things should be, at least until the day each and every user understands their devices, a day which will never come. Because why? They are tools. They are a means to a real life end. It’s a waste of human time to make everyone “tech-literate”. Users should not have control over their devices, because social engineering and scams will always be a thing. No matter how many “DON’T ENABLE THIS UNLESS YOU ARE A SOFTWARE ENGINEER” warnings you put grandmas will continue to be scammed.
Then what can let me have a native shell with root access on my iPhone, without jailbreaking? I don’t know, maybe a small on-device software knowledge exam to prove you are a software developer and understand what you are doing by Apple? Separately sold root access enabled devices for devs? Putting a big red warning in front of the root access “IF YOU ARE NOT A SOFTWARE ENG. YOU ARE %100 BEING SCAMMED RIGHT NOW” which is read by TTS ten times until one can dismiss it?
Or just get the Linux on mobile to feature parity with iOS and we won’t be beholden to corporations. Not saying it’s easy obviously. Still I’d like to see one organized FOSS mobile Linux project instead of a hundred desktop and a dozen mobile distros going on at the moment. OS lacks organization. Enormous amounts of available skilled human time wasted. Sad.
Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
In other words, there is a big difference between disagreeing with a statement that doesn't match what you've observed in reality at all, and being entrenched in your ways and insisting that the rising generation isn't "up to snuff". I don't see anyone dunking on Gen Z or insisting that they get their act together because they didn't have as many opportunities to dig into computers growing up.
I think there is a real argument to be made that nobody will ever need to be technically savvy again if AGI ever becomes a reality.
Edit: Gonna plug the book Scythe if anyone wants a fun read about an AGI run future that isn't the typical "evil AI" trope.
And thats what I think I'm seeing here, inexperience with what we consider to be technology basics being extrapolated to 'bad at technology'.
I think the argument you hint at could be interesting and have merit but to tie it back to this comment chain; I don't see any evidence of it here.
So, swinging this metaphor back to where it came from -- yes, it's not unsurprising that ignorance is the norm, but we must advocate for great enough personal education so as to empower the non-professionals. Bug-reporting is ultimately a user-empowering experience, designed to facilitate the user and make their tools better. This improvement feedback loop isn't developer-only, nor can it ever be; thus all of the reporting tools that are now common-place for the users.
Well one of the takeaways was that Windows users often didn't even report crashes in the first place, or have completely generic descriptions that didn't help at all. So a better analogy would be:
Should doctors think it's sad when you ignore some part of your body acting up, or you suddenly passing out during the day out of nowhere? Or, if you do go to the doctor, all you say is "doctor I'm sick"?
I think they should.
Misinformation is more costly than no information. Disinformation is actually more informative!
I'm not even kidding, this is what software has become for the common layperson.
Modern Windows is pretty resilient. I've had a Windows 10 install going for three years that hasn't BSODed, force-rebooted, or otherwise hung.
Also call me when Linux gets proper HDR and HIDPI support. The first 'Retina'-class Windows laptops were released in 2013, ten years ago.
As for HDR, that's here or coming in the next couple months.
Has been here for nearly a decade now. It's pretty straightforward, and even Win32 programs can be made DPI-aware[1].
[1]: https://building.enlyze.com/posts/writing-win32-apps-like-it...
Windows can't handle this, and will render blurry text in system dialogs.
Call me when Windows figures out how to render text /eyeroll
> Windows can't handle this, and will render blurry text in system dialogs.
Fix:
reg add "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers" /v "C:\Windows\System32\mmc.exe" /f /t REG_SZ /d "~ HIGHDPIAWARE"
A lot more motivating than not really getting any response.
About 50% of the time a complaint will be accompanied by the steps they performed, what they saw and what they expected to see. Often there'll be photos too, and enough information to diagnose remotely.
I think the difference with bug reports for commercial software is that it's invariably unacknowledged and unactioned by the developers. Why would you take the time to write out a clean report when the reasonable expectation is that it's ignored?
Good bug reports requires at least some understanding of how software works. I'd consider those to be power users.
To over-generalize, Linux users are by necessity power users. When you interact with the internals of your operating system regularly, you get a better sense of how software in general works. Particularly when things go wrong. You have to know how to find and read log files to use Linux. IMO, it's inevitable that Linux users give better bug reports because that's a large part of what it's like to use Linux.
Gatekeeping being a real developer wasn’t bad enough, we’re gatekeeping being a user now?
I’ve worked with plenty of developers who would have no idea how to generate a core dump, never mind users. Let’s calm down a bit.
In the early days of computing most users had strong technical skills (shocker), over time the commercialisation of technology and its entrance into everyday life has shifted the amount of users who can even start to understand how their software/hardware works. In contrast Linux is still a very technical OS to use, even installing ubuntu requires a certain __type__ of user, so the amount of Linux users who are capable of understanding their computer is much higher.
If you’re saying that not meeting some bar makes you not a member of a group, that’s gatekeeping.
> They are just consumers that don't use the OS, just consume it.