I often encourage people to submit bug reports when they complain about this or that on Reddit or comments here or wherever. This works as long as their problem is actually a bug.
But many problems are not bugs. They could be user error, a misunderstanding of the software’s scope or capabilities, a request for something impossible, a long rant about how the software sucks, or a request for help recovering the picture of their kawaii catgirl waifu that they just lost in Krita.
I’ve noticed that the more popular a product is, the worse the bug reports it tends to get. This makes sense, right? A niche product is used only by experts; a popular product gets used by 0-dots-in-computers users to whom bug trackers are weird and unfamiliar. It’s common for normal people to have difficulty describing a discrete technical problem in precise terms, or to bury the useful information in a description of their distant end goal or how the problem made them feel. Hard and jaded software developers who read such bug reports roll their eyes and cruelly wonder how their hapless users manage to plug in their coffee makers without electrocuting themselves.
But non-experts who are having problems with our software need help too! It’s just that the bug tracker isn’t the right place for it. What they need is user support.
This is where https://discuss.kde.org comes in. Discuss is full of magical people who are not only good at talking to other people, but also at understanding machines! These magicians can be the bridge between regular folks and software developers, providing technical support and filtering out problems that aren’t bugs so they never make it onto the bug tracker. They can also evaluate whether a problem is a bug and ought to be reported there.
So if you’re a happy KDE user, you can become a superhero by answering questions at https://discuss.kde.org/c/help/6! Help regular people recover their misplaced files. Explain to them that update errors in Discover are caused by their distro. If their issues seem to be real bugs, direct them to the bug tracker.
And if you’re having a problem with KDE software, and you don’t know whether it’s a bug or not, ask for help at https://discuss.kde.org/c/help/6. You’ll probably get a better response!
Adventures in Linux and KDE 
“Explain to them that update errors in Discover are caused by their distro” That’s the root right there. The linux-newbies mostly do not understand that the distro and the desktop environment are two different things. Why? WHYYYYYY are they doing this to meeee??? Even those who understand that, often do not understand how/why a distro would ever get released to the public with a DE that is not 100% reliable and a million percent tested in every scenario. Then add in the rest of the things that come from different places and you got yourself a perfect storm. Confused user-tsunami. People that recommend distros like Manjaro, KDE Neon or Elementary OS to newbies are not helping either… What all this boils down to is that the public desperately needs that one stable (but updated) superstar KDE distro that we don’t have right now. Until that day comes, confused, disappointed and pissed off new users will never end. Oh and to make it even worse, they most certainly do not read this or any other linux related blog either. Things are just supposed to work. For free.
LikeLiked by 1 person
“Oh and to make it even worse, they most certainly do not read this or any other linux related blog either. Things are just supposed to work. For free.”
I did when I was a new user. And I continue to do so. And I did and continue to understand that free-as-in-beer software is without warranty, that the people who work on it are volunteers, and that if I ask for help, I need to be proactive, describe my steps as much as possible, and be respectful of the time and effort people provide in helping.
For each user who emerges on to the scene and reads as a whiny, entitled person, I assure you, there’s a new user who quietly uses answers to questions provided online to help solve their own problems, and often is afraid of upsetting people by asking for help poorly. I was one of those users, and I still am.
By definition, you never hear about the quiet and respectful users. So unlike the users you’ve described, you can’t factor them into your assessment of what users are like. But they’re there. I think Nate’s advice is directed at that group of users, encouraging people to use the forum to get help, even if they’re shy. And who knows, maybe they found a bug, and the people on the support forum can help them craft a bug report and get it fixed!
The solution to the problem you’ve proposed isn’t a perfect distro that never breaks. I don’t think that exists in software. But it is a cultural problem, a personality one. There will probably always be users who act entitled and are never satisfied. But equally so, there will always be users that are thankful, proactive, and who might one day become contributors. The key is to build a project culture that attracts and retains users who respect the work of contributors, and can grow one day into contributors themselves — even if it’s just a bug report or two.
LikeLike
“I often encourage people to submit bug reports ”
So why flag distribution of KDE is not ready to help in reporting the bugs. I mean following problems:
– konqi started work since couple weeks ago
– konq is not stable application, because it crashes
– important option like “Install debug symbols doesn’t work
IMO working well konqi for sure helped a lot in reporting bugs, here crashes.
LikeLike
Thank you.
LikeLike
It’s a good idea, but I think that in KDE you have never been able to solve another of the big problems in user-developer communication: the language problem.
No, folks, most people don’t speak English. Knowing how to order a beer in a bar while on vacation or write simple sentences is not knowing English, let alone technical English.
As you say, it’s hard for a non-expert user to clearly and accurately explain a problem with software, and even harder to explain it in a language they are not fluent in, and this leaves out the majority of potential users on the planet from bug reports. I see that on discuss.kde.org there are some communities in a few languages, but similar communities already exist in Telegram groups. In my opinion KDE should work on implementing automatic translation systems, which are getting better and better and nowadays services like DeepL, Mate, even Google Translate no longer produce those quasi Dadaist translations of 10 or 15 years ago; search engines like gptgo.ai or ChatGPT itself respond to the user in their language with enormous accuracy, regardless if their databases come from sources in dozens of different languages.
I mean with all this, that KDE should try to implement something similar, not only on discuss.kde.org but also on bugs.kde.org. I think the number of participating users would be significantly higher because, maybe you English speakers are not aware, but to the majority, even if you tell them they can write their text in their language and use DeepL to translate it to English and paste into a bug report, the process seems too laborious (a bug report is never about reporting a bug and that’s it, it requires follow-up: reading and understanding the answers, answering questions about details, etc), and they end up giving up. Just spend a week in some TG group in a language you can read about KDE or some Linux software and see how many users feel like that.
I understand that it must not be easy to implement machine translation in DKO or BKO, nor if the best machine translation companies would be willing to collaborate allowing its use for free, or in exchange for advertising banners or something like that, but the language issue is a stumbling block, one more stone on the road to “the year of the Linux desktop”.
Regards.
LikeLike
This is an excellent point, and it underscores the need for localized user support. Bug tracking is necessarily done in English as English is the common language of international software development, but you’re quite right that this leaves out everyone who doesn’t speak it.
But while machine translation can help, I think there’s more to it than that. Beyond the language of English, there’s also the language of technical precision, the language of troubleshooting, the language of receiving help and faithfully following instructions, and so on. Even for people who know or are able through a machine to speak English, if they don’t know those other languages too, they won’t get very far. Their bug reports will be un-actionable, insulting, generally terrible, and consume lots of time to deal with. The truth is, regardless of what human language you speak, you really should only be interacting with the bug tracker if you’re a reasonably informed and technically precise person who’s comfortable interacting with brusque and gruff people and capable of exactly following instructions and performing technical tasks.
My point was that we need to be making much heavier use of user support channels to help separate “I’m having a problem and I don’t know what’s going on” from “there is a bug in the software right here that a software developer can fix.”
LikeLike