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One very solid point is the problem of cascading dependencies and their impact on stability. Trying to build a house when the ground is shifting under your feet is a bad idea. And yet that's exactly what we see time and time again in some of these projects. Different libraries. Different builds. Different interfaces. The whole thing screams FUCKDOM.
But anyway the point is that there's no contradiction between being commercial and being free software. The main free software license the GPL makes no restriction on commercial activity, but clearly a free software business model is going to be different from a proprietary one.
There's also another important resource, at least as important as money, and that's time. It isn't all about money. And motivation isn't all about money. When I primarily used Windows some of the best applications I used were produced by people who made no money and offered them at no cost. I'm thinking of things like EAC and DVD Decrypter, IrfanView, Media Player Classic and others. Not free(dom) software (except mpc) but a good example that lack of commercial motivation/funding isn't a barrier to creating excellent applications.
Whether commercial projects are "open" or not isn't the point. Open source projects, as a general rule, aren't "successful" unless they have commercial sponsorship. Successful projects require full-time oversight and focus.
If you use Slackware or Debian you're not going to have trouble with "the ground is shifting under your feet". Even using Debian testing it doesn't happen (to me anyway).</b
The real challenge comes not in choosing one particular platform -- since that isn't always possible -- but rather in trying to create software that co-exists peacefully (and stably) on more than one distribution. That's where the FOSS development model turns to shit quickly.
But anyway the point is that there's no contradiction between being commercial and being free software.
See above.
There's also another important resource, at least as important as money, and that's time. It isn't all about money.
Money buys all the time that it requires.
And motivation isn't all about money.
Eating is the most powerful motivator. There's a reason why Mozilla and other commercial organizations pay people. If there were abundant resources that were willing to provide leadership and give away their time, Mozilla would accept them. But that's not reality.
When I primarily used Windows some of the best applications I used were produced by people who made no money and offered them at no cost. I'm thinking of things like EAC and DVD Decrypter, IrfanView, Media Player Classic and others. Not free(dom) software (except mpc) but a good example that lack of commercial motivation/funding isn't a barrier to creating excellent applications.
Small-scale projects -- and grains of sand on a beach littered with crappy software and abandoned projects. For every success story, I'll show you 1000 that floundered and died. No, I'm talking about projects that require significant coordination and collaboration for success.
This is why distributions exist. It's their job to take the software source and ensure it runs fine on their distribution. Again, some distros are 1st class at this and some are definitely not. If you obtain software from your distribution's repositories and it doesn't work properly that's usually the fault of the distribution maintainers and packagers and doesn't necessarily reflect on the quality of the original code. The distro that's widely considered to offer software that's about as bug free as software can get is Slackware, which is vanilla as they come. Basically it works as intended, and as all the other distros out there build their OS from the same ingredients it's pretty easy to see that more often than not the bugs and annoyances experienced by users are actually introduced by poor QA at the distribution level. That's an area where the user has a good choice and there's no difficulty picking either a stable community distro like Slackware or Debian or choosing to use a commercial distro like SLED. You can even use Ubuntu and get paid support if you like. There are plenty of choices.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make about commercial sponsorship.
Even if it were true that "Open source projects, as a general rule, aren't "successful" unless they have commercial sponsorship." well so what? What's supposed to be bad about something being commercial? I'm struggling to find a contradiction being exposed here, unless you're associating free software necessarily as being anti commercial or equating it exclusively with being no-cost software, neither case being true. There's plenty of no-cost software out there that isn't free software, typically called freeware in Windows. Free software isn't defined by monetary cost.
Re: "For every success story, I'll show you 1000 that floundered and died." That sounds terribly melodramatic and again, so what? It's the same story with free and non-free, commercial and non-commercial software and pretty much every other project in every sphere of life.
I'm sorry you don't approve of the applications I mentioned when trying to illustrate my point about financial motivation not being the prime or even essential ingredient in producing software. Perhaps you'll approve of an alternative offering in this respect? SQlite. It's no cost, put into the public domain by its author and has been installed on several hundred million computers, every iphone and is an integral part of software used every day by hundreds of millions of people. I hope you deign to agree that this might constitute a small degree of success by the author in writing good code? I heard him being interviewed and he wrote it because he thought it might be useful to him, not because someone was offering him a bonus or a tax break.
The Linux crowd likes to spew forth the Ghandi quote:
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
They use it in relation to Microsoft's reactions to the Linux and FOSS movement. All was well and good, the examples they put forth of Microsoft's behavior seemed to fit, and I began to believe.
Now I realize that this quote actually works both ways. Pointing it back at the FOSS crowd, all I have EVER seen them do is make fun of Microsoft. Seems that they are stuck permanently at step 2.
How can this be fixed? Or are Freetards just too childish?
Bug status updated: WONTFIX
But well done, you've joined the ranks of LH posters who apparently don't have either simple reading skills or the brains they were born with. And you forgot to ignore me. Nice job :-)
"First they discuss with you. Then they laugh at you. Then they ignore you. Then you whine. "
Son, we live in a world that has walls and those walls need to be guarded by linux nerds dripping of nerd sweat and foaming at the mouth. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Lieutenant Weinberg? I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for your fellow lusers and curse the dickhead who won't fix your bug; you have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know.
I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the shitty OS made of freedom juice I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said "thank you," and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest that you pick up some dev tools and submit a patch. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you are entitled to.
Jimmy user:
I have this bug blah blah blah.......
Is there any timeframe about when it will be fixed?
[3 months later....]
Jimmy user:
Hello? Ping?
[3 months later.....]
Yvonne user:
I see the same problem as well.
[6 months later......]
Jimmy user:
Why this bug is not fixed?
[2 yrs later.......]
Derek triager:
The branch is dead. Please open a new bug report about trunk.
UNCONFIRMED -> CLOSED, OBSOLETE
A couple months later, this came out: http://glyphobet.net/blog/essay/140
http://www.ok-cancel.com/comic/4.html
It's your fault you didn't compile your kernel with --fix-shit . Your computer clearly cannot take it. Surely it's your fault for buying OEM with faulty Celeron processors , even if we only found out it was fauty 8 years after the fact. You can't even build one yourself! Therefore, It's your fault that DRI doesn't work with your card. Don't even bother sending a report. Debian hasn't uploaded the fixes to Unstable, so even though it works, you're sooo screwed. It's also your fault that DVD playback is close to impossible. You can't go on Amazon and buy a region free DVD drive. It's your fault that resolutions under 640x480 look like a clusterfuck of lines. Should have gotten an Intel. How dare you use old hardware, Even though the promise of compatibility with older hardware was the reason you bit our bait in the first place. Because you are a slave to the MAN! You have no right to complain about "problems". Go back to being a poor, binary dependent Windows user. You have no right to complain. You have no right to complain. you stupid head!
Sound familiar?
With Businesses that make software, the User is always right. The Company actually cares for its users, as they hold the sweet moo-lah companies depend on.
Hell, In business period, the Customer is always right.
FOSStards do not have a business model. They have the Frat house model. the only Baseline is blasting out from awesome import sony subwoofers. When DRI support for a popular chipset in Laptops is assigned to a college student majoring in Theatre Arts (I wish I was making that up), with only a livejournal and dusty Mailing List as contact, You know someone had to be PARTYING HARD!
Maybe if you're lucky, you'll be able to contact that frat boy through his livejournal, as his E-Mail address doesn't exist anymore. Maybe he'll be nice enough to pull out a solo cup and offer a sip of the mighty Open source Beer (http://www.freebeer.org/).
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=5031046
Ah, classic.
To any of the Bug reports that managed to get through at first? Triaged. Great job, fucks.
Another humorous yet frightening bug was when Hardy was in development, somebody, somehow, uploaded a bad build of Ulrich "Paymemoneytofixit" Drepper's GNU C Library, which seems to be the Power core to the FOSStard Death Star. What happened? well, just look yourself.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=722886
It's funny yet scary as hell in how easy it is to break this stuff.
I nearly died. Some of the fart humor was a little excessive for me, but that joke was pretty good.
And yeah, I agree, almost all of these open discussion-type forums on the Internet tend to get filled with garbage. Although it's expected that people be allowed to comment or discuss what they read or see, honestly, if I ran a blog like yours I'd probably not have a commenting system or make all of the comments private or something (that'd be if I were the writer; as a reader I just ignore them). Besides, if people are really desperate to discuss this stuff they could always do it on some meta-site (kind of like Digg allowing people to comment on whatever's linked)--just because you want to discuss a webpage doesn't mean your thoughts have to appear on that page. But at the same time, I'm personally kind of paranoid and generally dislike most internet discussion.
And that's bad enough on blogs and such, where discussion is the primary purpose of the website. I can't imagine a good reason for a completely open bug tracker...
WHAT
THE
CUNT?
What a bunch of fucking morons.
Although due to the high propaganda content and rehashing of the same tired old themes it's only half-assed wit, which therefore makes the author a half-wit.
If you don't provide that information, how else are we meant to get it? We could install a root kit on your machine I guess, and just log in and get it ourselves, but something tells me people would be a little pissed of by that.
The other alternative is telepathy, but that's not worked too well for me in the past.
Now consider that everywhere but the US and Canada has a different keyboard layout, personally I have a British keyboard. As Mark Shuttleworth lives in England, he too will have been affected by this bug. That's how far-reaching, and fucking lame it is.
Naturally the solution is simple: if you know how to edit xorg.conf. Frankly I was tempted to send this one to LH, but since it's 'just a bug' (well group of them really) I decided not to. Frankly, I wish I had, since this is a great showcase of how ugly and open bug tracker can get, it's also a great way to show the piss-poor release management of Hardy Heron. This is a show-stopper bug, there is no way Hardy should have gone out the door with a critical bug like this in there.
I've heard rumours that foreign language forums are full of upset people who've been fucked up the arse by FOSStards Canonical and this bug.
Luckily I know how to hack around, and read the man page, for xorg.conf. Luckily my mum had me around to fix it for her, but imagine trying to run your business on a system where your fucking currency key wouldn't work (£ in my case).
This is not just a bug, it's a fucking debacle. In a supposedly stable, well-supported version of Ubuntu.
you mean that my OS is even more non-deterministic than usual. I can't even get the same results using the same command in different distros... sign me up, I never wanted a consistent and stable OS anyway.
As far as "trying to run a business on a system" if I was a sole trader or very small business but not technically minded I'd do what most businesses already do with their IT, their vehicles, their telecoms and everything else that's vital: I'd pay for support. That's what it's there for and Ubuntu definitely is well supported in this respect. For any business big enough to have its own IT department a problem like this will be solved in a couple of minutes and usually the solution would be rolled out overnight or at the weekend.
I'd say the maintainers are doing a decent job of handling the bug, especially considering they're being deafened by numerous idiots. I've definitely seen much worse bugs reported and handled really badly. Here's one that is a really critical bug, and the whole thing turns to shit in every possible way: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=119185 I can't remember how I came across it, maybe at linuxhaters.blogspot.com......
"In spite of numerous perks and a peaceful work situation, my proclivity for Linux and open source foundered; doing something for pay destroys any outside interest you have in it. I began seeing what was wrong with the OSS movement, whereas in my honeymoon period I'd seen solely opportunity, code galore, and clean-cut PR men promoting software libre with a happy penguin's face. Now my view gained clarity, revealing a toxic wasteland of obsolete protocols, poorly implemented utilities bound by jack-of-all-trades POSIX, and rabid advocacy spearheaded by an aging hippie with a beard untouched by water or detergent, a relentlessly self-promoting gun nut afflicted with cerebal palsy, and a Finn."
For me that would be a total deal stopper, the computer system has to work flawlessly out of the box because I already know I am going to have enough challenges working with my application software, that I know for certain if I am messing around for a week trying to work out an xorg.conf file problem, there are gonna be other fundamental problems/annoyances with the operating system.
In my experience the situation you describe would be a total deal stopper in any business that know of.
Also, in my experience, every instance of linux in the workplace I have encountered... They use linux as a dumb terminal emulator and nothing else. Man thats gotta bruse your ego...
There is a statement from one of Ubuntu's X maintainers assuring people that it is a high priority with Canonical to get it fixed, outlining the problem and why it might take a while.
Or they could have just not fucked it up in the first place. It's an absolute show-stopper problem, it makes Ubuntu virtually unusable for so many people.
Hardy should have been held back until this was fixed, it's symptomatic of a larger failure of Canonical to release a decent LTS in Hardy. I am quite alright with in-between LTS' releases being a bit borked/experimental, but LTS releases must be rock solid, from the date of release.
Fucking debacle.
It's a 30 second fix, 5 seconds if you touch type and use the console.
Also worth remembering is that the problem only exists on desktops using auto-login with Gnome. This definitely isn't everyone or even a majority of users. I've never worked in a business or organisation where auto login was permitted, usually I've had to go through more than one level of authentication before using a PC or terminal and the software.
I don't use Ubuntu Hardy though I have tested it (and did use several earlier versions) and agree that Hardy was a train wreck of a release. But this is only one version of one distribution, their screw ups are *their* screw ups and don't reflect on anybody else. Personally I doubt that Canonical/Ubuntu can issue consistently stable releases every six months. They haven't achieved consistency yet (after about 3 years of existence). 6 months is a short timeframe and looks even more difficult when you consider they base their distro on a snapshot of Debian Unstable. If you value stability and consistency it's best to look elsewhere. Ubuntu does not equal GNU/Linux.
ps. the bug report I linked in my earlier post is much better material for bashing free software. I'm surprised that the non-freetard non-lusers round here haven't managed to do anything with it yet. That's rather surprising for a group of people who are so evidently highly intelligent, articulate and insightful.
Not if you're a noob.
Also worth remembering is that the problem only exists on desktops using auto-login with Gnome.
Happened to me without using auto-login.
I feel like I ought to include a form letter of "sorry nobody ever replied" as I tell them their bug was fixed in version (2 years ago).
Sorry.
At least people will read your posts and learn ..
Either way, they're screwed
1. In my native language, Firefox's default fonts are overly serifed, blurry, unreadable crap. I've submitted a bug report 3 years ago, with a patch to Firefox's defaults when using the languages' encoding. The solution used Free(tm) fonts that already where in the repository. After some backs and forths. the bug was closed as fixed.
The problem still persists, to this day.
2. On my year and a half old computer, Ubuntu is uninstallable, due to the chipset. I've submitted a bug report, plus the workaround. The bug persists to this day in both Gutsy and Hardy.
I've submitted several dozens of bug reports, most of them included patches, workarounds, stack traces, what have you. Most of them are still open.
Let's do a quick calculation:
A fresh, inexperienced QA person costs ~10$/Hr around here. Each bug report took around 1Hr to write, each patch took around 2Hrs (including testing, documentation, etc) (this is actually a developer's work, ~20$/Hr for newly out college CS major).
lets assume I've submitted 20 bug reports + patches (and ignore lost time, frustration, etc).
Around this parts, Windows costs ~50$ for an OEM version, less so for student version.
Office 2007 costs ~100$, even less for student version.
That's the costs, in time, of 15 bug reports, at the most.
If this hypothetical tester actually takes the time to fix those problem, and submit a relevant patch, then the cost of software, in time, is equivalent to 4 hours of developers' time.
The rest is free:
Antivirus software is free: AVG, Avira, Avast!.
Developer tools are free: VS express, Eclipse, whatever.
Skype, Messenger, Windows media player, K-lite codec pack, 7zip, etc, all free.
For those who think that Vista is a resource hog:
A brand new, vista capable computer, including 22" LCD, dual core processor, dedicated video, and 2gb of memory, costs around 700$, I'll leave the patches/QA worth as a exercise.
Btw: this calculation is utterly bogus - most people around here use eMule and Bittorrent to get software, so the real world cost of software for most end users is zero.
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bugs
What a joke.
That's actually a useful description, compared to lots of "Can't send mail" bug reports I've seen in my life. ;-)
1. too many distrubution - it seems like every advanced user make one
2. because of that companies have big problem witch providing drivers that will work on every distrubotion (because who have time to check 30 of them?)
3. promoting ultra shitty ones like ubuntu, opensuse, fedora, mandriva - in one word systems that are more problematic, unstable and slower than windows xp.
4. Ingnoring really good ones like zenwalk, pardus (witch is actualy supported and used by turkish goverment) or pclinuxOS.
LH should link to it in one of his posts.
This is an excelent post!
You just forgot the ubuntu brainstorm, which is mostly the same thing, but with ideas... All people wants to help but in the end what ideas are going in?
DEATH TO LINUX & ALLAH AKBAR!
what i'd like to underline is the "six months later" detail. yeah, "months" is how the bug fixing go in the linux world. and when developer actually fixes the filed bug, then it have to pass at least another month or so for a new version to appear in the repos, and until then, there appear at least a few new threads around with users begging someone to include fixed version in the repos... this is all just too much time consuming and ineffective.
I, personally, have had more support (as a user ) on the opensource world than on proprietary world. Maybe some people haven't, there are many possibilities, but make a judgement that OpenSource is bad because of some users case is wrong.
Sometimes I just visit some IRC channels (like #ubuntu, for intance) talk with the guys and my problems are solved.
And I agree that not anyone can triage bugs, and this idea is not spread on Opensource in many project, that why we have so many other ways to communicate (like irc channels, wikis, emails and so on...)
I believe that is the funniest damn thing I have heard all day. Thanks for the laugh!
There's so much truth in what you're writing and I hope all those Open Source developers out there visit your blog as a reference for bug fixing on a regular basis.
Hahaha:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/rhyth...
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/dash/+bug/...
Greetz
1. FOSS software is open and *free*.
2. Some minimal amount of information has to be given in order to fix a bug.
You can't have your cake and it it too. If you want decent support, pay up. If not, fix it yourself, or wait for six months. If people who are filing bugs can't provide the needed information, they get their money's worth ($0,-).
It looks to me that people use this as an argument to prove that open-source software is flawed. Repeat after me: LINUX IS NOT FOR EVERYONE. Or open-source software in general for that matter. Anyone who actually believes otherwise, deserves to get both kneecaps amputated. If you have to rely on others to fix bugs while time is a critical factor, well.. tough luck. Pay up, shut up or give up. Only the contributors who actually used a good portion of their free time has the right to complain, in my opinion. Like some of the posters below who sent in patches to Ubuntu. Why they got rejected is beyond me.
If I sound overly elitistic, feel free to point out where you think I'm wrong.
career
baby
love
wedding
movie
anecdote
children
management
automobile
marriage
health
cat
dog
wedding
Philosophy
food
travel
DIY
lose weight
gardening
flower
health
love
wedding
Never tried Linux before, so Ubuntu, here I come, for better or for worse!
An excellent exemplar of a Bugzilla fossil footprint, there. Keep up the profanities. If real Bugzilla reports were equally full of profanities, then at least they'd cheer me up.
You've missed out the worst part of FOSS networked Bugzilla, however. It is an article of faith amongst commercial developers of software that 99% of testers are illiterate morons with a persecution complex. (And they're mostly paid on a par with actual developers, but that's a beef we need not go into here.)
It is also an article of faith amonst *good* commercial developers that the other 1% are worth their weight in gold.
What do we get with networked Bugzilla? A crap-tide from the 99%, illustrated by pages and pages of test-tool output, and a link at the bottom asking "Does anybody know why this happens?"
Yes, I've been googling a lot for answers to technical questions. The sad thing is that Google seems to rate these morons quite highly, if only because the other 99% click on *exactly the same stupid report.*
Unless some corporation takes all this code that has been accumulated and makes a decent package out of it, by fixing bugs and removing unnecessary slack people made in their free time (useless reduntant text editors, filesystems, and windows systems nobody will use) the whole thing is a bust. We do NOT need more GUIs, and text editors, we need better update features, installers and a new X server. We need a new Office. We need a DVD authoring software. We need better 3D support. Why nobody fixes those?
- So, here you get it. In a couple of lines, i 've told you everything that sucks in linux.
The only reason Firefox and Apache succeeded is because the have one some short of a business structure. Most importantly, if something needs fixing, it WILL get fixed, and not rely on the INTENTION of someone fixing it. Someone has to FORCE people into fixing bugs and other mandatory stuff. Fixing bugs, providing a new X server, installers and ensuring compatibility between updates is -let's be honest- boring, so all these developers simply deny to do it, they are not forced or paid for. But it has to be done, someone is has to do it.
If it's not done, you get low quality stuff like Ubuntu, with tons of problems in updating, incompatibilities between updating, sloppy 3D support and bad installer. THE REASON: Nobody want to make better ones, and since they are not force to, they are not. So, with these critical compoments left forgotten becayse Ubuntu (and Linux Mint, in a lesser degree) becomes sucky.
- To me, linux reminds me the time I was a kid, well I would make nice drawings and shapes instead of doing my homework, because I didn't liked doing homework and I liked.
So, I challenge you, people, find me a Linux disto that has the quality to compete with MacOS X and Windows Seven. What? You don't care about competing? That's what losers say...
Just don't come bitching about driver and 3rd party software support. Hardware and software makers support the winning team, and you are not in it. So, your OS will always lag in hardware and software support, unless it improves it's quality. Simple as 1-2-3!
There are automated bug reporting tools, some distros ship them by default and having tried one, Gnome's bug buddy, it actually is pretty good. It automatically submitted a concise and accurate report. I've also had the pleasure of using Microsoft Windows' automated error reporting. I can't tell you if it worked well because user involvement ends at the point of sending the automated report. Stuff still goes wrong but I gave up sending the error reports.
I've reported various bugs and feature requests for free software projects and never once has anyone invited me to submit a patch. Usually they're reported by multiple people and get dealt with. Sometimes, usually with a small project, the principal developer gets in touch and I've been able to discuss various feature requests, argue my case and sometimes they agree and implement it and sometimes they don't. If you can demonstrate a bug and it's repeatable it does tend to be fixed. Small projects are often more timely with non critical things than big projects.
I'd be interested to know what ideas are out there for improving the process of bug reporting and handling. Are there systems already in place that can be shown to offer clear advantages for both users and developers?
When Joe User is reporting a problem, He shouldn't be required to create an account. on Launchpad, or whatever bug tracker. All Joe User wants to do is send an Error Report. When he is redirected to a website to file a bug report, he notices the site is slow to load. this further annoys Joe. when Joe is finally finished submitting the report, he is notified that someone may have already reported the bug. What does he see?
dozens of reports JUST LIKE HIS.
Joe notices that many reports are classified as Triaged, not even acknoledged. Joe thinks that the maintainers and developers don't seem to care. Joe stops sending bug reports.
Sadly, Joe is probably right.
But Joe shouldn't worry, It'll get fixed... eventually.
If you have to "argue your case" as you did to get shit done, Joe user won't even bother. In fact, he'll ask his friend to reinstall "the windows".
It's not the bugtracker's fault. it definitely isn't Joe's fault. Who's fault is it?
I've seen some bugs handled horribly but mostly they're dealt with in a very unexciting and useful way, i.e they get fixed. But linuxhater has set up a hypothetical scenario as an example to give his fanboys something simple to digest (mushy unsubstantial stuff for undeveloped minds, the intellectual equivalent of baby food) and now you have made another one. I'm not sure anyone can really say much about the hypothetical disappointment of a hypothetical person in a hypothetical situation.
Back in the real world I had a look at launchpad (I'm not an Ubuntu user so it's a place I visit much) and it loaded quickly. I did some quick searches for bugs in Epiphany browser (because that's what I'm using now) and read a few. I made a point of looking at triaged bugs. Triaged definitely does NOT equate to unacknowledged, in fact by definition a triaged bug has been looked at, and a response has been made. Often the triaged ones have been referred upstream and so the fix is made elsewhere and a reference is given. I simply can't find any that match your scenario, or linuxhaters.
Can people not find real bug reports that are unsatisfactory as alleged by linuxhater?? It seems very odd that linuxhater and fans have to invent something to argue against.
I'm going by past experiences, but the more I look now in launchpad the more I am reminded of the past-- where nothing was done, nothing was accomplished but some bickering in comments over who's fault it is.
And the "fixed" slice of the bug report pie is... so small you can barely see it. That pie should be all green.
Sorry, My past experiences with the FOSS community may seem especially "hostile". I apologise.
"Fixed Released" means the fix is in a package and is available for download. "Fixed Committed", that small green slice you're referring to, means the bug is fixed in some git-repo or -proposed package tree but not in something a normal user actually downloads.
Projects need testers where does LH think they come from. Thin air? Training and production of them is required. Lot of projects are building training documents for this reason.
Also important issue particularly seen a lot in wine. That X version of hardware causes strange effect developers and current group of trained testers don't have it some new untrained turns up with it. Bugzilla is useful for that.
Some how I think LH is just simply lazy. Laziness is the only reason really for not reporting a found bug. Ok some cases the bug will be disregarded. Other cases it will be your own error.
Now lazy people make up all kinds of reasons to explain there laziness away. Just because a few people post wrong into a Bugzilla it does not make it a useless tool. Its only useless if people with skills stop using it like LH is saying.
If bug tracking is so bad. Do as a favor LH design a system that will work. Ok I did not say code. Design only. Put that on your Blog. We would have replaced it if we had a better one that covered all problems. Put up or shut up on this topic.
If developers want detailed reports AND mainstream Linux use, why don't they write ONE central bug reporting system, AND a working, automatic utility that gathers the crash information and sends it to the server with no end-user interaction, save for a simple dialog box. (Said box would let them submit the report, cancel, or view the information it contains.)
It's already there. It's called "the market." Unfortunately FOSS is largely absent from the market by its very nature, which is a big part of why it sucks so much.
The point isn't that LH is too lazy to report the bugs it's that he's disillusioned with the attitudes of the devs towards the average user of computers. They don't know anything about debug symbols, or fixing a problem by running the following fix program.
{ bool bugReport(true);
while (bugReport)
{worksForMe()};
}.
Most people don't know the first thing about terminal, and since it's all about the end user the bug reports can definitely be an epic fail.