Fascinating both for what it says about dev & what it says about statistics:

A gamedev realized Linux users were just 5.8% of their sales, but represented 38% of bug reports.

Then they looked at those numbers closer, and realized. Linux users were not experiencing more bugs. Almost none of the Linux-user bugs were Linux-related. Linux users were simply *more likely to file bugs*.

Their conclusion: A linux port pays for itself bc it nerdsnipes ppl into giving u free QA

https://techhub.social/@ozone89/111337250473454154

This is the "what if lab rats just get cancer a lot" joke except real

Do you have a correlation in your data? Or is one of your sample groups simply more likely to generate *statistics*?

"A recent study performed on the University of Toronto campus with participants selected by responding to a flier offering $5 for participation, revealed that 92% of all Canadians are students at University of Toronto…"

(This is a joke; I suspect sociologists have some way of correcting for this already)

@mcc uh IIRC this is a “joke but not really” in psychology and social sciences.

The joke is “add ‘among mostly 18–22yos with the social status to be in college’ to every psychology paper”

@mcc wait i just noticed i got that game from a steam coupon lmao nice

@mcc Linux users are immersed in a culture that explicitly views software as a communal effort, working towards common purpose. Maybe that idea isn't explicit for everyone, but when people are steeped in it, of course they contribute bug reports! A bug report is an attempt to help the project! It may also feel like a complaint, but the material effect of it is helpful.

@irenes Or they value their time less "lol"

@irenes @mcc brushing the oxidation off my Bugzilla search skils confirms that Linux is responsible for disproportionately more bug reports to the size of the user base as a whole.

Windows is 85% of Firefox users on desktop, see https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/hardware.

I can write this up as a blog post if folks are interested.

@irenes @mcc
It's probably more simple than that. A much higher proportion of Linux users work in jobs related to software development or deployment, or have that as a hobby. That background is likely what attracted them (us) to the OS in the first place.

And so a much higher proportion know that filing bug reports is important, and a much higher proportion is familiar and comfortable with the process.

@emma @mcc you totally should

@emma @mcc also can we just say that it took us a moment to realize you weren't trying to say anything about rust the programming language there :)

@irenes I'm poking at rust some now.

@jannem

The Golden Rule in action: "Well, I'd certainly hope somebody would file a bug report to let me know about an issue in *my* project!"

@irenes @mcc

@mcc This is a huge, huge, huge problem in personality science. If you want to get any sort of demographic information, about the distribution of traits through a population, you can't actually do it through voluntary testing, because the selection indexes of so many interesting things on "who is voluntarily willing to take a personality test" are kind of astronomical.

@mcc Sometimes I wonder if Firefox isn't heavily under-measured as a browser because it's run by privacy nerds who set up no telemetry, no js, or other forms of blocking that obscure it, for example.

@mcc (OpenBSD knocks)