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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Real nice unique looking game too. Gameplay is good but the look and feel you can tell was a lot of effort and thought and love. Definitely glad I made the purchase especially after seeing this post. Cool dev
IT professional here, can confirm, Linux is superior and my choice of os.
… despite my work being mostly Windows Server.
Also: IT professionals usually have some experience and/or start out with Help Desk (hell), where you quickly learn what is and is not a good issue report.
This is pretty US centric thinking. Linux doesn’t have licensing. That means it’s used extensively in other countries, especially poorer ones. Some countries entire governments use it. It’s pretty huge in India too. Africa. Places where common folk, not IT professionals, use it but either have rough or no Internet and aren’t communicating in English, especially not GitHub.
While maybe not professional IT people but Linux users are quite known to be passionate about finding solutions. It’s quite recent that you can have a hands off experience with Linux, it was always a tinkerer’s OS before.
I remember in high school having friends who were going crazy at the chance to be the one who could solve an OS issue, like an IT medal of honor.
Actuaries probably get paid more than data scientists. But that’s based on a sample of one: my brother is an actuary and I’m a software dev who works with a data scientist.
As far as I know, the only thing that the new python integration helps with is that users don’t have to install Python or have to know how to use pip to install packages like pandas, because Python doesn’t run locally. It is neat how you can visualize data and show it inline with the Excel document though. My industry is very regulated, so we won’t be able to use it since the data you pass to Python goes to Azure for processing
Me ! I’m a more recent Ubuntu user . But used it alittle in highschool over 10 years ago . Both my parents can’t even use a computer . But I had a really good tech teacher who handed out Ubuntu CDs to who ever wanted one and helped me learn to program .
I’ve been running Linux in one way or another since ~2007, a good 6 years before even considering working in software development. So I guess it was the other way around for me haha. Parents couldn’t be further from the field.
I’ve been using GNU+Linux since 9th grade because that’s when I got a computer. My parents have absolutely nothing to do with computers. What got me there was simple lack of understanding. I barely knew what OS was, but I needed to get one. And soon after, I misunderstood Windows as another distribution, so I went with Linux Mint.
Pilot turned woodworker here. Been using Linux for 10 years. Granted, my father was an IT guy…who’s career had nothing to do with Linux, he’s a Windows Server/AS400 guy.
I am not an IT professional and neither is my dad. I discovered linux through virtual machines on the cloud that you can connect through vnc and fell in love with the commandline.
Can you get a PE license in software engineering? Serious question
Edit: PE = professional engineer.
In most parts of the United States the title “engineer” or “professional engineer” is a title with legal requirements & responsibilities in the same way calling yourself a medical doctor or lawyer would be. Folks with the credentials to be a professional engineer are tested & licensed by the state to practice engineering, similar to the way the bar or medical board would vet lawyers & doctors.
The dude certifying the structural plans for the bridge you drive over every day is in this category. Same with other categories of critical engineering from the fields of chemical, electrical, mechanical, civil, environmental, etc.
That said, TIL software “engineers” aren’t part of this group. Maybe they should be
Reminds about scene from cartoon(EqG to be exact) where character that often perceived as light-headed or just dumb is asked while solving problem on a blackboard and replies “Advanced physics? I thought they really ruined PE”.
A computer engineer is something else entirely. Basically, they often work with electrical engineers to write low level drivers or something, and rarely do much in user space. Software engineers are the opposite.
It probably also helps the report rise to the level of “exceptional” if the reporter understands anything about the backend. If you don’t know what your even looking at its hard to explain tech specifics in detail about it.
I am not tech savvy and I had to report a bug at work for a website/program I have to use. My report was basically “X isn’t working [picture of x not working]”. Microsoft started asking me about my license number and something called RLS…I don’t know any of that. I don’t even know where to find that. I can barely Google that. I took 7 page clicks and 10 minutes just to submit the bug in the first place… My bug reports are shit because I dont know what Im looking at, an IT person probably would have included most of the info they were asking for in the original report.
Thank you, this comment made me feel a lot better that I maybe wasn’t just being flat out incompetent right out the gate. Their questions made me feel pretty stupid and I appreciate your suggesting that its somethings I might just not have been exposed too before as my job is very not tech centric.
As a developer, all I ask for is a description of what happened, what you expected, and details on your configuration (OS, browser, hardware). It would be even more awesome if you could provide a set of steps to reproduce it, but that’s not necessary.
But honestly, a bad error report is usually more useful than no error report. I’ll probably disregard it if it doesn’t have much info, but if I see a lot of similar reports, I can glean info from them to get an idea of what went wrong. But if you have the above, that can mean the difference between a fix being done really soon or me needing to wait for more info.
Not an IT guy, just a dude that got tired of the Windows blue screen of death back in the day and discovered Linux many years ago as an alternative. I can’t code to save my life, but I know enough to use GitHub to report bugs I encounter. It can be time consuming and tedious but when I help alert others that know how to fix the problem I’ve helped in a way that gives me a little bit of pride that I always cherish knowing I’m giving back to the community.
This matches at least my personal behaviour. I’m a programmer myself, so if a game or application has a bug I’ll instantly start thinking about what could’ve caused it and what data would be useful. It’s advantageous for me because the bug may be fixed, and (hopefully) advantageous to the Dev because they get the information they need to fix it. It doesn’t always work though. At one point I sent an entire stack trace and all kinds of debug info to an app developer. I got the response that they’d look into it, but nothing ever comes of it. I’d accept it if they just admitted that it’s not worth their time, but somehow that’s also too hard to say.
I always always write strong feedback and extensive bug reporting for games. Doesn’t matter the platform. However, my daily is Linux and my daytime job is director for cloud eng and ops which is all linux distros. We write and manage massive nix fleets. Shit my career started writing and doing linux kernel work. It really made me appreciate good feedback and extensive reports on bugs.
Go to ./var in home and backup the entire “com.valvesoftware.Steam” folder if you plan to use Flatpak again, or navigate to data/Steam/steamapps and copy just the stuff there. For native games you might have to look inside .config and .local in “com.valvesoftware.Steam”, that’s where games usually store their config files and saves.
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