Richie’s Computer Stuff

The other thing too are the shareholders. It’s not enough to just make a profit, there has to be quarterly growth or it’s seen like a failure. Because the PC market is saturated, they have to switch from expanding user base to extracting more value from each user. This is where you get things like upsells for subscription-based services which continuously generate revenue from each user instead of just once (no more one-time license purchase), data harvesting, and ads that are carefully tuned for each user to maximize engagement and conversion rate.

I also suspect this is part of why Microsoft lets you use Windows without activating, even though they want you to (and will nag you to do so). Even if you never buy a license, there’s still ecosystem lock-in, data collection, ads, and future upsell potential. That’s just my thinking though. I haven’t personally used modern Windows (10/11) in over five years so I don’t know if it’s changed since.

They go for quarterly growth regardless of the, uh… tradeoffs it actually creates. There is no way Microsoft isn’t aware of the growing irritation from users, the backlash, and resistance to frivolous and aggressively added AI features, which makes the fact that they keep doubling down all the more baffling to us. While I know this is a broad oversimplification and I’m not hitting every point involved, I’m fairly sure the user base is not who they’re serving, they’re more interested in meeting market and shareholder expectations.

Keep in mind that I’m not an expert on the matter (not even close), I’ve just watched a few videos and articles to give me some sense of this sort of thing, so I am just speculating and thinking out loud. I am in no way defending what Microsoft is doing, and I’m glad I did that little lockdown-based experiment in 2020 to see if Linux really could replace Windows for me (it was a resounding success!!).

I remember wanting to use Linux at that time. I thought it was so interesting, but my technical expertise just wasn’t there. None of the games I liked playing would run on Linux, and I wasn’t ready to let go of the pans of glass inside a frame that my PC was still running at the time. I’d play around with it in virtual machines and on live USB devices, but that was it. I was always thrilled when I could get an old computer for free that was powerful enough to run a modern Linux distribution.

Well, fast forward to 2020, and I discovered that Linux gaming had quietly made leaps and bounds, and so I thought I’d just install it on my PC exclusively and see how it worked out. Well, it stuck, and I’m never going back.

That’s essentially it. I suspect this is probably a bigger problem when profit is what drives the development of the game rather than passion. I know it’s more nuanced than that because profit-driven developers can still be passionate and care about the quality of the product, but I personally suspect that profit-first development is where there’s less tolerance for bug reports. And, keep in mind that I’m still speculating, but I suspect that many of those profit-first devs are probably the same ones that rush releases… and we know what that generally does to the “final” product.

Bug reports really are a good thing. It’s as you said. One group needs to change, and I don’t think it’s the Linux users. Some developers consider it free Q/A and free testing, but like you said - if bonuses and rep are on the line, well it’s easier to see how this sort of thing happens where Linux versions of software get pulled because of the volume of bug reports. I think it’s dishonest, really. Many of the big names have the developer volume to make this less of an issue.

I just wanted to add to what you said by sharing this bit of information, because I do find it very interesting to see. I hope I don’t come off as argumentative, because that’s not my intent.

I recall this post on Reddit from an indie game developer of the game “ΔV: Rings of Saturn”. They said how 38% of the bug reports for their game came from Linux users, despite only making up 5.8% of the purchases for the game.

It does make it seem like the Linux version of their game was buggier, but of the some 400 bug reports they got, only three were specific to the Linux build. In this case, getting more bug reports from Linux users did not indicate the game was buggier on Linux.

I will not say this is the case for all cross-OS games because this is just one example, but it seems that Linux users are more inclined to provide bug reports than Windows users are, and that doesn’t necessarily mean Linux versions of software are buggier. In some (maybe even many, I don’t know) cases, the Linux version certainly is buggier or performs worse due to developers spending less time on it or other reasons I’m not aware of, but it’s not always the case. The higher volume of bug reports from Linux users may give the perception that the Linux version is buggier.

And, as the developer mentioned, those bugs exist whether or not they’re aware of them. I’d argue that the decision by some developers to remove Linux versions because of the higher volume of bug reports is short-sighted because many of those bugs are not going to be OS-dependent, and now there are fewer reports of them.