KDE Developers Are Currently Seeing 150~200 Bug Reports Per Day

[Weasel]

In the original article is written: "It means that people are using the software! Most of the bug reports actually not about KDE issues at all: graphics driver issues, bugs in themes, and bugs in 3rd-party apps. And many are duplicates of existing known issues, or really weird exotic issues only reproducible with specific combinations of off-by-default settings."

Of course, I'm willing to bet half of those are because of Wayland. And not because of a bug in Wayland, but by design. Design issue. Crippled protocol.

[ngraham]

To put this in perspective, KDE normally gets 900-1500 bug reports a month but currently they are track to receive 4500-6000 bug reports in the first month of release.

But I'm a troll, idiot, asshole, dummy, moron, stupid, don't know what I'm talking about and so on, because I expect a project to thoroughly test their software before releasing it.

This is the epitome of being a half-assed project, if Microsoft or Apple released an OS that was garnering 6000 bug reports a month, spite the vastly higher usage of Windows and Mac OS compared to Linux+KDE, then the open source zealots would be crowing up a storm.

To put it even more in perspective, I worked as a release engineer at Apple from 2009 through the end of 2016, and I can tell you that Apple got far more bug reports than that from purely internal sources (which is a rough equivalent of the kinds of people who submit bug reports to FOSS). Right now KDE has over 24,000 open bug reports; by the time I left Apple, the internal bug tracker had over 2 million. This was at a company that tightly controls the environment that its software can run on, unlike KDE which is far more permissive.

I'm not sure your standard is attainable for anything other than limited functionality embedded non-user-facing software with a fixed software stack and hardware deployment target.

[schmidtbag]

As someone who just upgraded yesterday, it seems pretty good to me. So far I only have 2 gripes, neither of which are all that bad. Most things either seem no different or are better. My experience before the update was pretty solid, and one of the few gripes I had is fixed in 6.0. I can't help but wonder if it's user error if you're getting an unusable experience.

As for the quantity of bugs: it does seem rather high but I'm sure a large chunk of them are either repeats or are directly fixed by something else. I wouldn't be surprised if some were distro-specific. Some distros do a much better job at maintaining DEs than others. For example, my experience with Arch + LXQt or Budgie was quite bad, but the errors I got with them were often due to libraries prematurely updating.

[sophisticles]

To put it even more in perspective, I worked as a release engineer at Apple from 2009 through the end of 2016, and I can tell you that Apple got far more bug reports than that from purely internal sources (which is a rough equivalent of the kinds of people who submit bug reports to FOSS). Right now KDE has over 24,000 open bug reports; by the time I left Apple, the internal bug tracker had over 2 million. This was at a company that tightly controls the environment that its software can run on, unlike KDE which is far more permissive.

I'm not sure your standard is attainable for anything other than limited functionality embedded non-user-facing software with a fixed software stack and hardware deployment target.

Allow me to point out that Apple has about 161,000 employees, so if each of them submitted just 10 bug reports you end up 1.6 million reports.

But I have to say, if KDE has over 24,000 open bug reports and the team is still working in new features then there is something seriously wrong with the way the project is being managed.

I would stop all further development until every last bug was gone. I would also get rid of all the developers, the project supposedly generates about 300k a year, i would hire 2 people with Masters degrees in Computer Science from a well respected program, pay them each 150 a year with a business plan that once all the bugs are eliminated and i could honestly say it is 100% bug free and reliable, then I would split the project into the current free open source one and a version that is highly optimized for performance with handcrafted assembler everywhere possible,

Even if the assembler didn't result in massive speed gains, which i think it will result in massive speed gains, but even if it didn't, it would at least lower the memory footprint substantially.

Then i would market this parallel version at 50 bucks a year with the sales pitch that it is a lot cheaper than upgrading your computer because it results in XX% speed increase. Also it's 100% bug free.

And you offer the programmers a piece of the pie, with the ultimate goal of licensing the optimized desktop to someone with deep pockets, Red Hat, MS, Sun, someone with cash.

But, 24,000 bugs to me is unacceptable, this smacks of really poor management.

[ngraham]

I'm not sure you actually understand that KDE is a community of volunteers and not a company with employees, but okay, I'll bite. Go ahead and try your idea! Fork the codebase of every KDE repo, hire those people to fix all the bugs with no feature work, and then sell the result within the context of a commercial shell that you set up and run. Nothing's stopping you.

Seriously, do it. If you succeed, it will be amazing.

What's stopping you?

[MorrisS.]

Matter is that many of us have bugs which are absent in Plasma 5 under KDe Neon.

1. the screen goes to suspension during streaming both with Nvidia drivers and MESA;
2. if the screen goes to suspension when Nvidia drivers are installed, it's very difficult the screen is restored;
3. the screen goes to suspension even if this function is disabled from system manager;
4. 23.2 Mesa drivers are still not full hardware compliant on browsers based on chromium (because of software compositing);
5. if the system goes to suspension the screen is black after restoring;
6. the backup features is no longer available in system manager;
7. the Printer page in system manager has became chaotic and dispersive;
8. the folder column randomly disappears on Dolphin after restarting it at least on X11;
9. left hand feature doesn't work on Wayland environment, indeed its option is shadowed (it works selecting PS/2 port as mouse port whether a PS/2 mouse is used. It means:
   1. select the port;
   2. flag the left hand option.
10. the packages of the upgrade could be not coherent with the specific packages present at the moment of the upgrade making the new environment unusable.

How can a user feel motivated to participate for what doesn't work or even worsens the experience in the desktop of the environment from Plasma 5? The end-user says: «I waited to have an improved experience getting shit instead of chocolate, so goodbye.»

[schmidtbag]

sophisticles And I as armchair president of the world will end world hunger with my litany of ideals that are easier said than done!

The only thing you said that I agree with is to prioritize bug fixing, and even then, not to the same extent. Good luck making something as complex and modern as KDE 100% bug-free. There are people even on these forums who think design choices or even options in KDE are bugs. It's not possible to please everyone, especially for a product like this. But even if we only focus on legitimate bugs (behaviors that don't work as intended), KDE is not a sensible choice if stability is your #1 priority - there are plenty of DEs out there that suit different niches. I don't limit myself to a single distro or DE, and neither should anyone who has multiple systems for different purposes.

24K bugs is alarming but what matters more is the metadata behind them and how quickly they're being squashed.

[bug77]

I'm not sure you actually understand that KDE is a community of volunteers and not a company with employees, but okay, I'll bite. Go ahead and try your idea! Fork the codebase of every KDE repo, hire those people to fix all the bugs with no feature work, and then sell the result within the context of a commercial shell that you set up and run. Nothing's stopping you.

Seriously, do it. If you succeed, it will be amazing.

What's stopping you?

I'd say it's pretty obvious software development is not his trade...

[ngraham]

24K bugs is alarming but what matters more is the metadata behind them and how quickly they're being squashed.

I agree it's still too high, but another thing to remember is that this is across all KDE software. The number of open bug reports in Plasma itself is 4,011 as of right now.

[schmidtbag]

I agree it's still too high, but another thing to remember is that this is across all KDE software. The number of open bug reports in Plasma itself if 4,011 as of right now.

Considering what that encompasses, that number is a lot more reasonable. I'm sure it won't take long until most of them go away.