I remember a gamedev complaining about this on Twitter but the outcome he came to was that he hated that Linux users submitted bug reports, stating the OS itself was broken and he refused to help any of them.
Well that’s certainly a way to look at it. I’m sure some of the issues reported were Linux specific, but most were probably applicable to Windows, and Windows users probably just bailed on the game.
It all depends on whether the developer cares about fixing those bugs. For big studio games, the answer is obvious. For AAA games, even more so. The shriveled, starving optimist in me wants to think that those developers have become jaded and don’t believe that players can make valuable bug reports.
My only problem with reporting bugs in a game, despite knowing how to report a bug and playing a lotta games, is that I don’t always have the knowledge a thing happening is a bug and not the intended design. It’s not like I, as a regular every day player, have insight into what was supposed to happen that would indicate a bug.
Obviously a bug like my guy doesn’t jump despite pressing the jump button is pretty easy to recognize. But how am I to know the damage calculation is fucked up when I’m not told what the formula is supposed to be?
I remember when Elite Dangerous was still in beta, there was a bug where System Authority Vessels would label you a criminal upon attacking verified out-of-system bounties on the victim and attack you. So many players thought that was intended, like there was a “corrupt cop” system in the game until it was actually fixed. 🤦♂️
I really liked the idea that could be a possibility; unfortunately the fact that firing back at the “corrupt” cops just increased your bounty, which is what showed me that it wasn’t intended.
“If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.”
If it looks like a duck, swims like a dog and barks like a dog but I am still telling you it is a plain old duck, there is a miscommunication between me as a game developer and you as the player.
I would report so many more bugs if there was a way to do so easily, in app, without having to create an account somewhere or signup to some website or specific forum. Give me a one-click “report bug” box and I’ll do it. BG3 did this well.
I’ve never once touched the logs button until I used linux. Over my time asking for help with anything wrong on my machine I’ve been asked to provide logs, replication steps, what went wrong and what’s supposed to happen. This has trained me to be a good reporter and sometimes these issues help me fix them myself. Thank you Linux community for providing these skills. This isn’t gaming industry specific but even with things like protonvpn, vmware, virtualbox, and stuff on Arch I use.
Part of it too is that logging on Windows is just dogshit. No one uses event viewer so it’s not like the end user even knows where to look for logs, and most of the shit in there is like"lol computer crashed and idk why go fuck yourself"
Some games have such community, that it treats life as this game. For example community of certain factory optimization simulator was so enlightened, that optimized it and made 30% faster.
Bc linux users are not only more tech literate on average, but also have more of a sense of community and shared responsibility. Yeah, if we get annoyed by something, we know we’re not the only ones, and if we can’t fix it ourselves, we tell the ppl who can. You don’t just assume it will always be broken, or assume a future update will magically fix it.
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.
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 :)
Of course they do, but their are not big in number and market share. Maybe « Almost all world wide deployed critical infrastructures runs on Linux » is a better statement.
Exactly. It goes the same way in development too. People who say XYZ lang is better than Rust because “you get so many compile errors” suffer from the same misconception: Just because the errors aren’t immediately obvious doesn’t mean they aren’t there.
Welp, I was about to rant about it in here. Thanks for the heads up, hopefully it gets fixed by the weekend. Can’t wait to be absolutely rolled by Cunduit’s ult.
One issue with developing for linux is that userspace isn’t consistent between repos. Steam has solved this by vendoring all of the most commonly used libraries like zlib or whatever.
Assuming the bug is in-game then this information would definitely be useful for developers.
Umm… Zlib is everywhere. It just works. Even without steam. Even 20-years old games can run on moderns distros while using system libraries. Like UT2004 does.
Managed to delete my comment by mistake (sorry for the two notifications)
If a common library like zlib is in a non-standard place or is not symlinked to a standard place then I’ve seen GOG games fail to launch. Steam’s vendoring approach makes supporting a variety of distros much easier.
from the bits and pieces I’ve read on the official Discord (ugh), they’re using two anticheat solutions. EAC is whitelisted, but their own one doesn’t support Proton yet. they’re actually working on changing that, supposedly, but it’s not their priority at the moment.
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