Wine - The User Experience
DiMesio, Rosanne
Report and discussion of issues that impact Wine users.
 Alright, everyone, welcome. I'd like to introduce Roseanne Mezze, who is the premier forum wine developer. So she is the hero, heroine to all of us wine developers, because she keeps them away from us. The users away from us. While we're calling out heroes, I think it's important to celebrate Giv's work. Our friend Bela, who has done an enormous amount of work in Bugsillo over the last year. So I think we should thank them all for their help. So thank you guys. I think you have some slides, but if I recall right, it's kind of QA, like you're happy to be interrupted, and then it's more of a listening to me shaped. So Karen is going to kind of give her walls to the first one. I'm not a performer really. But you need to speak as loud as you can. Okay, so my title is Wine User Experience, and I want to talk about, first a little bit, who our users are. Last year when I could generally talk about users, I got the sense that people were interested in who our users are. What proportion you use, the stature, what proportion you have, these problems. And I could, because I read the forum, I could of course give my impressions, but this is just what I remember, the memory is imperfect. So this year I got ambitious and decided I was going to try and take our scientific look at it. So I actually scraped the forum for last year, and I didn't have time to tag the whole year. I just got this bright idea and I didn't do anything. But there were 815 threads created on the forum between July 1st and December 31st of last year. And I systematically went to the paddock on which was this that I was interested in trying to figure out how to statistically. As well as anything that started to look interesting as I was rereading that stuff. It's kind of experimental, it's maybe not the most scientific approach, but it's my first stab at trying to quantify some information. Because of course on the forum there's a great deal of information about what our users are experiencing, but it's in a very messy kind of format. So the first thing to keep in mind, the first thing I looked at is why are they closed? And it's important as I go through the other statistics to keep in mind that this group I'm looking at are people with problems overwhelmingly. We don't hear from people for whom wine is working perfectly. I mean once in a while, once a year, someone will post on the forum, you're doing a great job, it's wonderful, we love you. But three quarters of our posters on the forum have a specific problem they want to solve. A lot of people have a question as opposed to a specific problem. And it's usually, most of those are how-to questions, how do I do this in one? Some of them are also the next biggest group of questions are does this app work in wine before I buy a situation? And then there's the small group of random other reasons for posting. Often suggestions, I should do this, which being users admittedly often the suggestions are simply naive. Why don't we raise money to pay developers to do this? I'm sure the developers were love, but of course users don't have a clue how expensive that is. So, you know, I will give you 50 bucks to write this patch. They're well-mean. I also looked at what operating system they're using. Now, there's 98, we don't require people to identify that, but because we now have specific Linux and Mac subforms, even if they don't tell us what they're using, we know by what they've posted. So, of our four users, again, three quarters, our analytics, Mac users are about 12 and a half percent, and we had two lonely free BSD users. And that's about typical, you know, we get a couple free BSD users a year. I will say only the Mac users, proportionally, are underrepresented, and the reason is most Mac users are in fact using third-party apps to run line, and that's not supported in our form, and in fact we have a sticky at the top of the form thing. We don't support these things, and essentially, are telling them they'll post it. So, I suspect there are probably more Mac users out there, certainly than proportionally, but they're not going to come to our forum for help. I also looked at other people who use Linux, what these are, to the extent that, again, they identified it. Many didn't, but proportionally, Ubuntu and derivatives, other than Linux Mint, are the biggest group. I simply counted Linux Mint separately because they're big enough to be counted separately. They're our second biggest group. We have a little bit of a wide-debate, and then that little wedge of other, and a breakdown of how it worked out. The other other is, their distros, but they were fewer than 10 people to end posts, so I just lumped them together. So this kind of, obviously, Ubuntu dominates here. Keep in mind, this is a group we're talking about, a group that has problems, as opposed to a group that is representative of all our users. So one can speculate, you know, why Ubuntu users seem to have more problems. I think one of the factors is that Ubuntu is marketed to newbies. They have a higher proportion of newbies in general, and the other groups that have fewer people, these tend to be more experienced than other users, who are able to solve their own problems. So even if they have problems, they're not necessarily coming to us for help. Whereas Ubuntu users, what we see on the forum, you know, or I think last year I said, are typical users. It's just finished installing Ubuntu, and now wants to play World of Warcraft. And they're not even quite sure how to use their package manager. So I think that's a big reason why we see so many Ubuntu users. And I think, again, I don't think they're necessarily that dominant in terms of all users. It's just that they're that dominant in terms of who we're hearing from, as promised. I also took a look at what version of wine they're using. And now not everybody identifies that actually only about 54% actually identify the version of wine. And in the group, you know, starting at the top, 1.7, which came out in August, 1.6 came out in July. Previous development released 1.5, previous stable release 1.4, and pre 1.4, 10 people, I lumped them all together. There are always random people who are using ancient versions of wine. The general reasons for that are either they're on a very old de-spoil and there are literally no new packages for it, or they have an app that needs an old version of wine. Often they have an old patch, never made it into wine. Their app depends on it, so they literally have to use this agent to burn the wine around this specific point. Now, looking at this, it looks like, kind of like the current development release is about equal in usage to the current stable release, kind of 50-50. That's misleading. You'll see on the next chart. But keep in mind that the time period I looked at includes the two weeks when 1.6 first came out and it was literally the newest release. So people who normally use the development branch and update every two weeks were of course using the 1.6 at that point. And so that's artificially caught. Now, having read the form, I feel there was a particular problem with the 1.6 branch. And the next chart shows usage by month. And I'm assuming you did this. 1.5 is at the bottom of that. It goes down. That blue line, 1.6. Usage was at its high point when it was released, which is not surprising to me yet, as I said. People who normally use the development branch were also using that. So that initial drop is expected when 1.7 comes out because that group jumped to this. What's unexpected is the nose dive. 1.6 takes between August and September. And by the end of the year, it's actually below usage of the previous stable release. And this is something for those of us who do use their support, not just on the forum, but also in the OZILO in terms of triaging loss. It's been driving us crazy. Because... Maybe because in Ubuntu it's still 1.4 by default? Yes. That's what I was getting to. That is exactly what happened. Ubuntu shipped 13.10 with 1.4 by default. We're talking about, of course, newbies who don't necessarily know there even is something other than what their DSTRO's repository has. So they installed 13.10, they installed 1.4 by default, thinking they have the newest version of Wine. They run into a problem. Hopefully they come on the forum where we're equipped to deal with these kind of newbie problems. But unfortunately, a lot of them have, in fact, been filing blows from 1.41. They told to retest. They fined this fixed of course. It fixed a long time ago. And, you know, then they go through having to upgrade. So that's been a problem for the past few months, literally. In terms of... But it shows how dependent users, particularly inexperienced ones, are on their packages. And what their users are doing. In this case it's not the user's fault. They don't know any better. This is their package manager told them they had the newest version. And to be fair, whenever someone goes out to go to a forum, they're wondering why not. What they're told to do is, app get installed this. So when you're going to go get Wine, app get installed Wine, and then you have 1.4. And now you're stuck. And that's what they're told to do. So, is this... Scott didn't update this package fast enough? I mean, what's the issue here? I mean, I can't because it's not the end of October and when the 206 came out. How much later? I think it was too late to change the package. The decision which package they used was a relief. And that's, you know, small part fixes. In the way. And change the package to a newer version. This is not allowed in the short time before release. And after the release, you have to take a big way to get the package update in the same release. That's a good time. 1.6 came out in July. And that's too... Which time it is? OpenSUSA managed to ship... Maybe it was a time before, for example, when Scott has holiday in this summer time, for example, just in this time, when he comes back, maybe he's a deadline over, don't know. Yeah, I don't know the reasons. I just know it's causing us problems. And this is abnormal to have the stable release drop that much. Now, Development Branch is, as expected, going up. Part of the reason it's going up is the other big thing that happened last year is the December scheme update basically brought all versions of wine prior to that. It was fixed in the Development Branch within one day. Why not? You guys are superheroes sometimes. Seriously. I mean, you can't ask for anything better than that. But of course, I spend a lot of time on the forum, refutably telling people, you know, if I take the one place that was planned, then it's on the next. It was updated in the Development Branch right away. That wasn't backcourted to the stable branch until like, 4.6.22, which just came out. Not too long ago. So, again, that's also taking from people who perhaps may have preferred to stay with the stable branch. They could use 1.6, but of course, meaning to play their games takes precedence over everything. So, we have a sharper downturn. One question. What distributions do you use like the stable branch except even the deviant? Because I know Fedora is still, you know, the time frame, so they take whatever it is. You know, the decision to have this two branch system was made before I ever became involved in wine, but I know there are different opinions. As someone who does user support, I am endlessly telling people to upgrade to the latest development. I mean, there's a certain kind of a race period after the new stable branch comes out. I'll give, you know, for maybe a month or so, I'll say, well, a great addition to the latest stable branch. But then I start to see that there are bugs even in the latest stable branch that have been fixed in the development branch. So, let's say, at that point, I start telling people automatically to try to buy a stable branch. It's a problem helping users, because those of us who have helped users were experienced users. We're using the development branch. And as it goes further in time, I don't even remember what was my six-plus-luck. I'm based. Well, the thing is you don't know how many users are happily using the stable release. Yeah, we don't. Oh, yeah, that's true. Yeah, I said that's true. We don't. We don't. So, I think we can effectively say that the steam, the whole line of steam users were very unhappy, at least until it was backported, but we don't know now that it's been backported to the stable branch. They may be perfectly happy. Now, people have a misconception about the stable branch. They said this last year to users the word stable means it doesn't crash. And, of course, that's not true. What do you mean it's not true? In general, people find the stable branch crashes more than the development branch. In particular, they're using 1.4.1. And the reason for that, the reason I'm particularly frustrated at 1.7 is that one point four was a voice down on one to users is that the VC, why is VC run in 1.4.1 was not yet ready, complete enough to run multiple apps. That was fixed by about 1.5.9. So, we're still, you know, seeing in these 1.4 people are seeing crashes in unimplicated functions that were implemented 18 months ago. And so, you know, my end, that's what has me frustrated with trying to help people because it was a needless problem, you know, if they'd been given 1.6, they wouldn't be seeing these crashes. Maybe stable is the wrong word. I mean, slow, stable. Actually, if your application works, I mean, don't change the lines. Hold it, you have to. You know, for those of us, again, who? Six months or a year ago, this is a duplicate. So, it's creating unnecessary work for the non-developer volunteers, like me. We should have aims over here, future fixed goodies. Okay, the next thing I looked at is third-party apps with the most controversial things. Many of our users, this is basically people who mentioned having used a third-party app prior to, you know, posting wine tricks, biggest usage, not surprisingly, it's the only one that's kind of semi-supported on our forum. I said it's controversial because, you know, officially, we only support plain wine. You're only supposed to foul bugs. And even on the forum, you're only supposed to use plain wine. We accept wine tricks simply because those of us who do the help mostly use it occasionally ourselves. And, you know, for my speaking, for myself, sometimes some of the questions about wine tricks are, in fact, problems with wine tricks, not with wine. I'll answer it if I know the answer off the top of my head, otherwise it's generally recorded to the guys at WineTrips.org. The second most common one is this play analytics, again, controversial, and people who are told to try plain wine and then get back to us. As mattering of others, WineBodler, WineSkin, and obviously, PlanetMac are actually all MAC wrappers. And this is definitely, as I said, under-representative in terms of people who are actually out there using these wrappers because specifically, we have a sticky at the top of the forum telling them that WineBodler and WineSkin are not supported here. So we're, you know, just not getting close to people. And Q for Wine is when you were one, and we are hearing about pipe wine. We're occasionally getting people asking for our help, and, you know, I refer them to your... And I look, by the way, at your support, it looks very good to you. And in fact, I'd recommend pipe like to some of our users to say, well, I can't get some of that like to work in wine after a minute. Because they have the best bet is pipe wine, so go down. So, but yeah, the third party app is a controversial one because for those of us who do support, people come in having totally messed up their wine freefix by installing a bunch of made of VMLs and making other changes. And in the case of plan, when it's possible using a patched version of wine that's not supported. And we're the bad guys who have to deal with it. So I know you can't do this. You won't talk to you unless you use plain wine. Okay, problems building wine. I looked at specific kinds of problems and talked, and I went to who has problems building wine. Not surprisingly, Debbie is at the top of people who have problems building wine. Most of our users are using packages, but, you know, there are people who for various reasons try to build it. Usually the main reasons for wanting build wine instead of using a distro packages is that the distro packages are out of date or there even aren't any. Sometimes it is because they want to use a patched version of wine. And sometimes it's actually because they want to run a regression test. So the reasons for Debbie and having such problems are multi-archs, of course, the difficulty of getting 32 big dependencies. But there's another reason that our instructions for building wine on Debbie and on our Wiki predate the move to multi-archs. They're totally useless for current Debbie and... Well, they're useful for people using really old versions of Debbie. We have seriously had people pleading with me for help, and I don't use Debbie in. I'm not qualified to give them advice. So if anybody out here uses Debbie in and knows how to build wine on Debbie, and if you could take the time to update our Wiki, your fellow Debbie and users would be very grateful, and I would be very grateful to you as well, because then I would have some accurate up-to-date information to point our users to. Why do you suppose that that problem with multi-arch is more common on Debbie than on Ubuntu, which also uses multi-arch? Ubuntu doesn't build packages. Ubuntu users don't build packages. They don't, but we also have somebody did pull, and I think it was actually Dan Kago, posted up-to-date instructions for building wine on Ubuntu. And it's literally what it comes down to. People have said they have searched the entire web and couldn't find up-to-date instructions for building Debbie, and now I actually found a blog that looked like it knew what it was talking about, and I literally have been referring users to this blog entry. Nobody said it didn't work. Of course, the other problem is people don't always give me feedback one way or the other. But at this point, I'm pointing people to an external blog that seems to know what it's talking about, and I hope it does. But I don't like doing that. Ideally, these kind of instructions should be on our website. Copying pasted from the other website. If somebody could verify, somebody knowledgeable about building on Debbie, and could actually verify to me that this actually is the accurate way to do it. Well, did the users came back to you? They didn't. I mean, that's part of the problem. The problem is I don't know. The problem with dealing with users is the disappearing user. So, you know, you give them a suggestion and never hear from them again, and maybe that's because it worked and they're happy, and maybe it's because they gave up, and maybe it's because they found a different solution elsewhere, or maybe they died. I don't know. That's a lot of problems. But yeah, Debbie is the bigger... The second one is actually sent us, and I was actually, myself, surprised that we had that many, for some reason, it's been sticking in my memory as being that big a thing, but they actually have a similar problem in getting up-to-date information as well as packages to satisfy dependencies. That's why. Yeah, the other problem is that Alexan allows to break that. So, you're the one. Well, again, most of the users who come on the forum are not building one. I'm just, you know, I looked at it because obviously if you can't even install a line, then, you know, you can't even get to further problems. So, I also looked at problems installing a package, and yes, we have people who don't know how to use their package manager, but they're also in problems, and what two users are at the top. And Linux Mint also uses the same packages. So, it's overwhelmingly in that group when people have any problems installing packages. Part of it is user experience, but it's not entirely in their fault. The problems were clustered in September and December. In September, as I recall, there actually was a broken bunch of package up there briefly that simply wouldn't be installed. And so, yeah, they came out of it. In December, the problem turned out to be our instructions on our website for adding the PPA. We have this nice little page that looks like, you know, completely idiot-proof. We have nice pictures. And this starting morning, copy and paste this line. Now, how could anybody screw that? They couldn't, but we did, because there was an extra space in the HTML, and because of that extra space, if they literally followed that instruction, it would not work. Now, I feel bad because we had a string of confused newbies coming out of the forum insisting they followed the instructions to the letter, and they don't work, and I'm thinking, you know, you did something wrong. I don't know what it is. I don't use Ubuntu. I don't know if Agumamn and her fellow reporters, the past retainer, are kind of brushing them off until someone, thankfully, finally figured out and filed a bug and did get fixed. I feel bad for these poor users. I didn't perhaps treat them as well, but this was our fault. What about the reports of problems since that's fixed? Oh, we haven't...actually, something did have a problem. I mean, we always had...again, because a big part of this is user experience, we're always going to get some people who just point, you don't know how to use the package. We on the forum, I refer them to the DSTRO because package managers are so different from DSTRO to DSTRO. I can help them with OpenSusa. That's what I use, but I don't have a clue how functions are in Biosk. So, we generally refer them to their DSTRO forum, and we actually...the guidelines for our forum are the knowledge, basic knowledge of how to use your operating system. The operating system is assumed that you're experienced. The reality is that description fits the people answering the questions. It does not generally fit the people asking the questions. But, you know, there's a balance we have to strike because we are not a general how to use Linux forum, and we can easily become one because of the nature of our user base, because they are people who just switch from Windows to very inexperienced and need a lot of help. So, at some point, we have to draw a line and say, no, I'm not teaching you how to use your package manager. You have to go back to DSTRO. But this was definitely our fault. Seems like a bunch of you could sanitize these or something like that. You know that having a space with a meeting should show up from the mysterious error that you can't figure out. Okay, so I also tried to tag threads for problems running online, and granted, problems are all over the place. But the key word that came up most often was crash, possibly because something that serious is more likely to get people actually seeking help. Graphics was second. Running an installer that failed was third, and we're going to kind of surprise me that it was that high was fonts. And then I just put up stuff that had at least ten input devices, including laptop altogether, keyboard, mouse, tablet, then mono.net, sound, networking, and performance. And this was actually things that I tagged as problems, not questions. The one, in most cases, the numbers are the same. They were basically all problems. Performance is the one area that actually had almost as many questions as problems. And how did I make the distinction? Well, in performance, performance is so bad you can't play this game, as opposed to... It's perfectly playable, but I want to, every last frame per second, I can get. And so we have definitely a group of hardcore gamers who, what, every last frame per second, as opposed to... This represents the people who say, you know, this is so bad, it's unplayable. So that's kind of a, you know, general range of the kinds of problems users are remembering. My experience is that the distinction between some playable and their best performance, I can get this kind of fluence. It is! I have to take... It isn't, when I was tagging, I basically accepted how the user perceived it, because this is what I'm looking at, it's user perceptions. If they say it's a problem, then that's a problem. I had this crossover user who played Skyrim at 7 frames per second, who was perfectly happy. And standing out in the skies, who played Hunter Strike at 100 frames per second, said it's terribly slow, I want 300. Yeah, and that's when they said that I'm, from my point of view, looking at, you know, how happy our users are, how are they coping. I take their word that this is okay, or this is not okay. Question? Yeah, I was just wondering, what are those problems? Oh! It looks good, I have to tell people sometimes to have applications that have been installed, some problems, and then... It looks either they're not rendering properly, or in some cases not showing up at all. The miss fonts basically, the application forces it on, and if it's not there, it's not going back, so you have to have the proper font installed. And the line keeps, does the job, get the fonts and it works. In some cases, actually font problems turned out to be actually language variable problems. And I'm trying to run, the Japanese fonts are showing up. If you try to run a Japanese program, but your system is set to English, it just doesn't work. In the same fashion. Yeah, you have to make sure that the locale of the machine matches the locale of the program. And you can start, you know, line with the correct language variable. Now in some cases people have done that already and the fonts still aren't showing up, and that's an actual code. But that, starting with the line variable is one thing that's actually not documented on our site. We have actually periodically get questions about it, but it's not in the user guide or the FAQ. So, that's it. So, moving on, I mean that was my statistics. I'll talk a little bit about user support, or as I put it, dealing with people who don't follow directions. And that's an oversimplification of course, because I'm a user myself. To the extent that I can help people is because I read the directions and I follow directions. But, we have a lot of information on our site. And it's clear that people aren't reading it in many cases, because a lot of what I do is in fact some people answer to your questions here in the FAQ. Yep, FBB. Now, my background, you know, and I'm not a technical person, my background is a teacher. And I tend to treat my users kind of like I treat students. Which means, yeah, I do expect them to do their homework. I expect them to be willing to learn. If they're not, that's their choice, but that's, you know, have a nice day. But I also know as a teacher that dealing with a student, I can't just say, read the textbook. That's what you need to do. And I also know that if a lot of students are making the same mistake, they're just not getting it. As a teacher, I have to take a look at what I'm telling them. Because clearly, I'm not communicating effectively. So, in talking about, you know, not telling directions and reading stuff, I wanted to take a look at why aren't they? And are there things that we could be doing there to make it easier for them? The example of, you know, that problem with the bunch of page is a clear example where it was our fault when they were trying and it wasn't working. Now, it's obviously not that we don't have enough information. We have a wiki with 848 pages. We have a OZILLO, which as of yesterday was up to 35,485 total bug reports, 7,700 still open. But in terms of looking for troubleshooting, you often want to read the closed bug reports as well. Information might be there. It might be something, one of the problems is people filing bugs for things that were already fixed. They're using that old version and we get to look at bugs. The app KB where we keep user reports on performance and verities has over 12,000 in it. And the forum has 16,782 friends. So it's not lack of information. Why aren't they reading all 65,000 pages? Just there, just go read it. Well, part of the problem, obviously the sheer volume of it, the website is divided actually into four distinct areas, the wiki, OZILLO, app, and the forum, which are essentially separate entities. It may be all YH2.org, but they each have a separate login. They have a separate search. And so the first thing, the first thing coming in to the website has to figure out is, which one am I going to search? Should I be looking in the wiki, OZILLO? Now if they come to the forum and I keep pitching the forum, they get my help and I'm pretty familiar with the website. I sometimes think my main role is a cross between a traffic cop and a reference librarian. So I just say, go there, you go there. And this is the information you need. As familiar as I am with the website, there are times when I can't find things I know are there, because I've seen them before. So it don't underestimate the difficulty faced by users on our website. Now let's say they decided to search more than one. They will sometimes find multiple pages on the same thing that don't agree with each other. So I was putting together this presentation on this kind of surprise. I mean we actually have four different sets of instructions on how to file a bug. They don't say the same thing. In some cases they directly contradict each other. And so what a user is going to do if they're coming in to file a bug and they've never filed a bug before, they're not a technical person, is they're parking the pen at which set of instructions they happen to read. And if they happen to read more than one, there's a very real danger they're just going to discount all of them and do what they think best. Or they're going to pick and choose pieces. I mean they're going to call this best they can. But this is why I think in part, and I wanted to focus in part on bugs, because users, obviously inexperienced users, file them. It causes problems because they file bug reports that no one could possibly even attempt to fix because it doesn't have the information needed to even think about it. Or it's a duplicate, invalid, they're using an old version of wine, they didn't read the instructions, or which set, or they read the wrong set of instructions. So we're not, like, this is a sort of a job that you can recruit people as volunteers to work on, right? It doesn't require skilled wine, but like fixing this could be done by, there are many people in the world who can fix this, right? And we're wine hacking is harder. Have we just not attracted those volunteers? Are we doing something wrong? Is it, I mean is it just... Well we have the person that we did a lot of migrating stuff to the weekend, cleaned up the weekend, but it's a lot of work. Did we not buy them on a beer? I mean what? We didn't invite them, so... Why not? Yeah, are we... Well, okay, this one is the wiki one and that's probably the best one, the most up to date. And in terms of users actually filing bugs, that's the user guide. This is the one above, it's on the 1HQ, the main page. So if users were going to Bugzilla, that's what they would see. Now, that's a lot shorter than this, and I think part of the issue is people are not actually reading this. People of triage bugs would like them to read this and they're not, and that's actually one of the things I wanted to address is why I think they're not. So what I wanted to do was... Here we have it. So here is the main page here, folks. So the file bug is the first thing I see that says, before you record, go please make sure you've completed the following steps. This looks like the instructions. So let's pretend I'm a new user, you know, I'm not technical, I'm a reasonably intelligent person who reads what's in front of me and tries to follow the instructions, but I'm not experienced. But I have a bug that's very important, and I'm recording it because I'm told me to record something fresh, I got this nice pop-up saying, I'm a bug, and you have a nice little capture back trace. And I wanted to walk through these steps from the point of view of someone who's never filed a bug. So first step, create a login account. Well that's easy, I can do that. Create the logins on the website, so I go ahead and do it. Step two, use the available bug list. This list shows the submitted bugs that have not been assigned to anyone yet. If you want to work on a bug, this is the place to start looking. So I, you know, I just installed Ubuntu ten minutes ago. That doesn't seem relevant, you know. Now there's a link there, and so, you know, well I can click a link. And, okay, there it is. There's the available bug list. It's limited to 500, well, I could see all of them if I wanted to see all 7700, but that's not, that takes a while. So as a user of, maybe, you know, this is, why is this even in there? Reporting a bug. The problem is as a user, that step teaches the user is that some of these instructions are not necessary or relevant to filing bugs. And I'm going to re-order that because I'm going to tell the person who learns from what I'm doing. So we've gone through that. Now, step three. Make sure you are using the latest stable version or build from Git, comma, if similar bugs have recently been fixed in a minute. Yeah, okay, so I'm an English teacher, so I'm going to tell you that comma does not belong there. But forgive me, we're getting really short on time, kind of wanted to give you a warning, and I know you're... And I don't want to stop you because what I want you to do is get this fixed, but we are getting low on time, so I kind of want to see if we can accelerate this. Okay, all right. We want to look at if we're rigid on our schedule, but I do need to... All right, so just looking at that grammar aside, and it's an atrocious sentence. If similar bugs have been fixed and committed, how on earth am I supposed to know that? If I click on Git, it leads me to another page that tells me how to maintain my patches using Git. So I know that doesn't apply. So that leaves me with the latest stable version, which that I can understand as a user, and I'll go and my package manager will tell me that 1.4.1 isn't even the latest stable version. And so I'll go on to read our tips on bug-continued support. Now, I'm here to report a bug, and I've already gone through a couple of things that I know aren't related to reporting bugs, so I say, well, this has nothing to do with me. I'll just skip that because I'm getting tired of having her in. I don't want to file this bug. This link is what leads to that page that has the actual accurate information that people should be following. They're going to skip because it doesn't look like it has anything to do with reporting a bug, and you've already explained them that some of this stuff doesn't. Then read the FAQ and you might do that. Submit only unknown bugs. You actually have two conflicting links that lead to different places. This one will actually lead you to finally submitting the bug. So we have a series of instructions, half of which have nothing to do with actually reporting a bug. And it's set up in a way to train people to, in fact, ignore the turn of our expectations. And that's why they're doing it. So it's easy to say, well, users are inexperienced, stupid, they're not following directions, but in fact, we're training them. They are, in fact, intelligent people who are doing what we're teaching them to do. That's my point. Who is going to fix this page? Do we have any of the bugzilla elements? You're going to fix it? All right. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Did you have anything else you wanted to get to? No, that's it. That's it? Yes. Thank you.
 Alright, everyone, welcome.  I'd like to introduce Roseanne Mezze, who is the premier forum wine developer.  So she is the hero, heroine to all of us wine developers, because she keeps them away from us.  The users away from us.  While we're calling out heroes, I think it's important to celebrate Giv's work.  Our friend Bela, who has done an enormous amount of work in Bugsillo over the last year.  So I think we should thank them all for their help.  So thank you guys.  I think you have some slides, but if I recall right, it's kind of QA, like you're happy to be interrupted, and then it's more of a listening to me shaped.  So Karen is going to kind of give her walls to the first one.  I'm not a performer really.  But you need to speak as loud as you can.  Okay, so my title is Wine User Experience, and I want to talk about, first a little bit, who our users are.  Last year when I could generally talk about users, I got the sense that people were interested in who our users are.  What proportion you use, the stature, what proportion you have, these problems.  And I could, because I read the forum, I could of course give my impressions, but this is just what I remember, the memory is imperfect.  So this year I got ambitious and decided I was going to try and take our scientific look at it.  So I actually scraped the forum for last year, and I didn't have time to tag the whole year.  I just got this bright idea and I didn't do anything.  But there were 815 threads created on the forum between July 1st and December 31st of last year.  And I systematically went to the paddock on which was this that I was interested in trying to figure out how to statistically.  As well as anything that started to look interesting as I was rereading that stuff.  It's kind of experimental, it's maybe not the most scientific approach, but it's my first stab at trying to quantify some information.  Because of course on the forum there's a great deal of information about what our users are experiencing, but it's in a very messy kind of format.  So the first thing to keep in mind, the first thing I looked at is why are they closed?  And it's important as I go through the other statistics to keep in mind that this group I'm looking at are people with problems overwhelmingly.  We don't hear from people for whom wine is working perfectly.  I mean once in a while, once a year, someone will post on the forum, you're doing a great job, it's wonderful, we love you.  But three quarters of our posters on the forum have a specific problem they want to solve.  A lot of people have a question as opposed to a specific problem.  And it's usually, most of those are how-to questions, how do I do this in one?  Some of them are also the next biggest group of questions are does this app work in wine before I buy a situation?  And then there's the small group of random other reasons for posting.  Often suggestions, I should do this, which being users admittedly often the suggestions are simply naive.  Why don't we raise money to pay developers to do this? I'm sure the developers were love, but of course users don't have a clue how expensive that is.  So, you know, I will give you 50 bucks to write this patch.  They're well-mean.  I also looked at what operating system they're using.  Now, there's 98, we don't require people to identify that, but because we now have specific Linux and Mac subforms,  even if they don't tell us what they're using, we know by what they've posted.  So, of our four users, again, three quarters, our analytics, Mac users are about 12 and a half percent, and we had two lonely free BSD users.  And that's about typical, you know, we get a couple free BSD users a year.  I will say only the Mac users, proportionally, are underrepresented, and the reason is most Mac users are in fact using third-party apps to run line,  and that's not supported in our form, and in fact we have a sticky at the top of the form thing.  We don't support these things, and essentially, are telling them they'll post it.  So, I suspect there are probably more Mac users out there, certainly than proportionally, but they're not going to come to our forum for help.  I also looked at other people who use Linux, what these are, to the extent that, again, they identified it.  Many didn't, but proportionally, Ubuntu and derivatives, other than Linux Mint, are the biggest group.  I simply counted Linux Mint separately because they're big enough to be counted separately.  They're our second biggest group.  We have a little bit of a wide-debate, and then that little wedge of other, and a breakdown of how it worked out.  The other other is, their distros, but they were fewer than 10 people to end posts, so I just lumped them together.  So this kind of, obviously, Ubuntu dominates here.  Keep in mind, this is a group we're talking about, a group that has problems, as opposed to a group that is representative of all our users.  So one can speculate, you know, why Ubuntu users seem to have more problems.  I think one of the factors is that Ubuntu is marketed to newbies.  They have a higher proportion of newbies in general, and the other groups that have fewer people, these tend to be more experienced than other users,  who are able to solve their own problems.  So even if they have problems, they're not necessarily coming to us for help.  Whereas Ubuntu users, what we see on the forum, you know, or I think last year I said, are typical users.  It's just finished installing Ubuntu, and now wants to play World of Warcraft.  And they're not even quite sure how to use their package manager.  So I think that's a big reason why we see so many Ubuntu users.  And I think, again, I don't think they're necessarily that dominant in terms of all users.  It's just that they're that dominant in terms of who we're hearing from, as promised.  I also took a look at what version of wine they're using.  And now not everybody identifies that actually only about 54% actually identify the version of wine.  And in the group, you know, starting at the top, 1.7, which came out in August, 1.6 came out in July.  Previous development released 1.5, previous stable release 1.4, and pre 1.4, 10 people, I lumped them all together.  There are always random people who are using ancient versions of wine.  The general reasons for that are either they're on a very old de-spoil and there are literally no new packages for it,  or they have an app that needs an old version of wine. Often they have an old patch, never made it into wine.  Their app depends on it, so they literally have to use this agent to burn the wine around this specific point.  Now, looking at this, it looks like, kind of like the current development release is about equal in usage to the current stable release, kind of 50-50.  That's misleading. You'll see on the next chart.  But keep in mind that the time period I looked at includes the two weeks when 1.6 first came out and it was literally the newest release.  So people who normally use the development branch and update every two weeks were of course using the 1.6 at that point.  And so that's artificially caught.  Now, having read the form, I feel there was a particular problem with the 1.6 branch.  And the next chart shows usage by month.  And I'm assuming you did this.  1.5 is at the bottom of that. It goes down.  That blue line, 1.6.  Usage was at its high point when it was released, which is not surprising to me yet, as I said.  People who normally use the development branch were also using that.  So that initial drop is expected when 1.7 comes out because that group jumped to this.  What's unexpected is the nose dive.  1.6 takes between August and September.  And by the end of the year, it's actually below usage of the previous stable release.  And this is something for those of us who do use their support, not just on the forum, but also in the OZILO in terms of triaging loss.  It's been driving us crazy.  Because...  Maybe because in Ubuntu it's still 1.4 by default?  Yes.  That's what I was getting to. That is exactly what happened.  Ubuntu shipped 13.10 with 1.4 by default.  We're talking about, of course, newbies who don't necessarily know there even is something other than what their DSTRO's repository has.  So they installed 13.10, they installed 1.4 by default, thinking they have the newest version of Wine.  They run into a problem.  Hopefully they come on the forum where we're equipped to deal with these kind of newbie problems.  But unfortunately, a lot of them have, in fact, been filing blows from 1.41.  They told to retest. They fined this fixed of course.  It fixed a long time ago.  And, you know, then they go through having to upgrade.  So that's been a problem for the past few months, literally.  In terms of...  But it shows how dependent users, particularly inexperienced ones, are on their packages.  And what their users are doing.  In this case it's not the user's fault. They don't know any better.  This is their package manager told them they had the newest version.  And to be fair, whenever someone goes out to go to a forum, they're wondering why not.  What they're told to do is, app get installed this.  So when you're going to go get Wine, app get installed Wine, and then you have 1.4.  And now you're stuck.  And that's what they're told to do.  So, is this... Scott didn't update this package fast enough? I mean, what's the issue here?  I mean, I can't because it's not the end of October and when the 206 came out.  How much later?  I think it was too late to change the package.  The decision which package they used was a relief.  And that's, you know, small part fixes.  In the way.  And change the package to a newer version.  This is not allowed in the short time before release.  And after the release, you have to take a big way to get the package update in the same release.  That's a good time.  1.6 came out in July.  And that's too...  Which time it is?  OpenSUSA managed to ship...  Maybe it was a time before, for example, when Scott has holiday in this summer time, for example, just in this time,  when he comes back, maybe he's a deadline over, don't know.  Yeah, I don't know the reasons. I just know it's causing us problems.  And this is abnormal to have the stable release drop that much.  Now, Development Branch is, as expected, going up.  Part of the reason it's going up is the other big thing that happened last year is the December scheme update  basically brought all versions of wine prior to that.  It was fixed in the Development Branch within one day.  Why not?  You guys are superheroes sometimes. Seriously.  I mean, you can't ask for anything better than that.  But of course, I spend a lot of time on the forum, refutably telling people,  you know, if I take the one place that was planned, then it's on the next.  It was updated in the Development Branch right away.  That wasn't backcourted to the stable branch until like, 4.6.22, which just came out.  Not too long ago.  So, again, that's also taking from people who perhaps may have preferred to stay with the stable branch.  They could use 1.6, but of course, meaning to play their games takes precedence over everything.  So, we have a sharper downturn.  One question. What distributions do you use like the stable branch except even the deviant?  Because I know Fedora is still, you know, the time frame, so they take whatever it is.  You know, the decision to have this two branch system was made before I ever became involved in wine,  but I know there are different opinions.  As someone who does user support, I am endlessly telling people to upgrade to the latest development.  I mean, there's a certain kind of a race period after the new stable branch comes out.  I'll give, you know, for maybe a month or so, I'll say, well, a great addition to the latest stable branch.  But then I start to see that there are bugs even in the latest stable branch that have been fixed in the development branch.  So, let's say, at that point, I start telling people automatically to try to buy a stable branch.  It's a problem helping users, because those of us who have helped users were experienced users.  We're using the development branch.  And as it goes further in time, I don't even remember what was my six-plus-luck.  I'm based.  Well, the thing is you don't know how many users are happily using the stable release.  Yeah, we don't.  Oh, yeah, that's true.  Yeah, I said that's true.  We don't.  We don't.  So, I think we can effectively say that the steam, the whole line of steam users were very unhappy,  at least until it was backported, but we don't know now that it's been backported to the stable branch.  They may be perfectly happy.  Now, people have a misconception about the stable branch.  They said this last year to users the word stable means it doesn't crash.  And, of course, that's not true.  What do you mean it's not true?  In general, people find the stable branch crashes more than the development branch.  In particular, they're using 1.4.1.  And the reason for that, the reason I'm particularly frustrated at 1.7 is that one point four was  a voice down on one to users is that the VC, why is VC run in 1.4.1 was not yet ready,  complete enough to run multiple apps.  That was fixed by about 1.5.9.  So, we're still, you know, seeing in these 1.4 people are seeing crashes in unimplicated functions  that were implemented 18 months ago.  And so, you know, my end, that's what has me frustrated with trying to help people  because it was a needless problem, you know, if they'd been given 1.6, they wouldn't be seeing these crashes.  Maybe stable is the wrong word.  I mean, slow, stable.  Actually, if your application works, I mean, don't change the lines.  Hold it, you have to.  You know, for those of us, again, who?  Six months or a year ago, this is a duplicate.  So, it's creating unnecessary work for the non-developer volunteers, like me.  We should have aims over here, future fixed goodies.  Okay, the next thing I looked at is third-party apps with the most controversial things.  Many of our users, this is basically people who mentioned having used a third-party app  prior to, you know, posting wine tricks, biggest usage, not surprisingly,  it's the only one that's kind of semi-supported on our forum.  I said it's controversial because, you know, officially, we only support plain wine.  You're only supposed to foul bugs.  And even on the forum, you're only supposed to use plain wine.  We accept wine tricks simply because those of us who do the help mostly use it occasionally ourselves.  And, you know, for my speaking, for myself,  sometimes some of the questions about wine tricks are, in fact, problems with wine tricks, not with wine.  I'll answer it if I know the answer off the top of my head,  otherwise it's generally recorded to the guys at WineTrips.org.  The second most common one is this play analytics, again, controversial,  and people who are told to try plain wine and then get back to us.  As mattering of others, WineBodler, WineSkin, and obviously, PlanetMac are actually all MAC wrappers.  And this is definitely, as I said, under-representative in terms of people who are actually out there using these wrappers  because specifically, we have a sticky at the top of the forum telling them that WineBodler and WineSkin are not supported here.  So we're, you know, just not getting close to people.  And Q for Wine is when you were one, and we are hearing about pipe wine.  We're occasionally getting people asking for our help, and, you know, I refer them to your...  And I look, by the way, at your support, it looks very good to you.  And in fact, I'd recommend pipe like to some of our users to say,  well, I can't get some of that like to work in wine after a minute.  Because they have the best bet is pipe wine, so go down.  So, but yeah, the third party app is a controversial one  because for those of us who do support, people come in having totally messed up their wine freefix  by installing a bunch of made of VMLs and making other changes.  And in the case of plan, when it's possible using a patched version of wine that's not supported.  And we're the bad guys who have to deal with it.  So I know you can't do this. You won't talk to you unless you use plain wine.  Okay, problems building wine.  I looked at specific kinds of problems and talked, and I went to who has problems building wine.  Not surprisingly, Debbie is at the top of people who have problems building wine.  Most of our users are using packages, but, you know, there are people who for various reasons try to build it.  Usually the main reasons for wanting build wine instead of using a distro packages is that the distro packages are out of date or there even aren't any.  Sometimes it is because they want to use a patched version of wine.  And sometimes it's actually because they want to run a regression test.  So the reasons for Debbie and having such problems are multi-archs, of course, the difficulty of getting 32 big dependencies.  But there's another reason that our instructions for building wine on Debbie and on our Wiki predate the move to multi-archs.  They're totally useless for current Debbie and...  Well, they're useful for people using really old versions of Debbie.  We have seriously had people pleading with me for help, and I don't use Debbie in.  I'm not qualified to give them advice.  So if anybody out here uses Debbie in and knows how to build wine on Debbie, and if you could take the time to update our Wiki,  your fellow Debbie and users would be very grateful, and I would be very grateful to you as well,  because then I would have some accurate up-to-date information to point our users to.  Why do you suppose that that problem with multi-arch is more common on Debbie than on Ubuntu, which also uses multi-arch?  Ubuntu doesn't build packages. Ubuntu users don't build packages.  They don't, but we also have somebody did pull, and I think it was actually Dan Kago,  posted up-to-date instructions for building wine on Ubuntu.  And it's literally what it comes down to. People have said they have searched the entire web  and couldn't find up-to-date instructions for building Debbie, and now I actually found a blog that looked like it knew what it was talking about,  and I literally have been referring users to this blog entry.  Nobody said it didn't work. Of course, the other problem is people don't always give me feedback one way or the other.  But at this point, I'm pointing people to an external blog that seems to know what it's talking about, and I hope it does.  But I don't like doing that. Ideally, these kind of instructions should be on our website.  Copying pasted from the other website.  If somebody could verify, somebody knowledgeable about building on Debbie,  and could actually verify to me that this actually is the accurate way to do it.  Well, did the users came back to you?  They didn't. I mean, that's part of the problem.  The problem is I don't know. The problem with dealing with users is the disappearing user.  So, you know, you give them a suggestion and never hear from them again,  and maybe that's because it worked and they're happy, and maybe it's because they gave up,  and maybe it's because they found a different solution elsewhere, or maybe they died.  I don't know.  That's a lot of problems.  But yeah, Debbie is the bigger... The second one is actually sent us, and I was actually, myself, surprised that we had that many,  for some reason, it's been sticking in my memory as being that big a thing, but they actually have a similar problem  in getting up-to-date information as well as packages to satisfy dependencies. That's why.  Yeah, the other problem is that Alexan allows to break that.  So, you're the one.  Well, again, most of the users who come on the forum are not building one.  I'm just, you know, I looked at it because obviously if you can't even install a line,  then, you know, you can't even get to further problems.  So, I also looked at problems installing a package, and yes, we have people who don't know how to use their package manager,  but they're also in problems, and what two users are at the top.  And Linux Mint also uses the same packages.  So, it's overwhelmingly in that group when people have any problems installing packages.  Part of it is user experience, but it's not entirely in their fault. The problems were clustered in September and December.  In September, as I recall, there actually was a broken bunch of package up there briefly that simply wouldn't be installed.  And so, yeah, they came out of it.  In December, the problem turned out to be our instructions on our website for adding the PPA.  We have this nice little page that looks like, you know, completely idiot-proof.  We have nice pictures.  And this starting morning, copy and paste this line.  Now, how could anybody screw that?  They couldn't, but we did, because there was an extra space in the HTML,  and because of that extra space, if they literally followed that instruction, it would not work.  Now, I feel bad because we had a string of confused newbies coming out of the forum insisting they followed the instructions to the letter,  and they don't work, and I'm thinking, you know, you did something wrong.  I don't know what it is. I don't use Ubuntu.  I don't know if Agumamn and her fellow reporters, the past retainer, are kind of brushing them off until someone, thankfully, finally figured out and filed a bug and did get fixed.  I feel bad for these poor users. I didn't perhaps treat them as well, but this was our fault.  What about the reports of problems since that's fixed?  Oh, we haven't...actually, something did have a problem.  I mean, we always had...again, because a big part of this is user experience, we're always going to get some people who just point, you don't know how to use the package.  We on the forum, I refer them to the DSTRO because package managers are so different from DSTRO to DSTRO.  I can help them with OpenSusa. That's what I use, but I don't have a clue how functions are in Biosk.  So, we generally refer them to their DSTRO forum, and we actually...the guidelines for our forum are the knowledge, basic knowledge of how to use your operating system.  The operating system is assumed that you're experienced.  The reality is that description fits the people answering the questions.  It does not generally fit the people asking the questions.  But, you know, there's a balance we have to strike because we are not a general how to use Linux forum,  and we can easily become one because of the nature of our user base, because they are people who just switch from Windows to very inexperienced and need a lot of help.  So, at some point, we have to draw a line and say,  no, I'm not teaching you how to use your package manager. You have to go back to DSTRO.  But this was definitely our fault.  Seems like a bunch of you could sanitize these or something like that.  You know that having a space with a meeting should show up from the mysterious error that you can't figure out.  Okay, so I also tried to tag threads for problems running online, and granted, problems are all over the place.  But the key word that came up most often was crash, possibly because something that serious is more likely to get people actually seeking help.  Graphics was second.  Running an installer that failed was third, and we're going to kind of surprise me that it was that high was fonts.  And then I just put up stuff that had at least ten input devices, including laptop altogether, keyboard, mouse, tablet,  then mono.net, sound, networking, and performance.  And this was actually things that I tagged as problems, not questions.  The one, in most cases, the numbers are the same. They were basically all problems.  Performance is the one area that actually had almost as many questions as problems.  And how did I make the distinction?  Well, in performance, performance is so bad you can't play this game, as opposed to...  It's perfectly playable, but I want to, every last frame per second, I can get.  And so we have definitely a group of hardcore gamers who, what, every last frame per second, as opposed to...  This represents the people who say, you know, this is so bad, it's unplayable.  So that's kind of a, you know, general range of the kinds of problems users are remembering.  My experience is that the distinction between some playable and their best performance, I can get this kind of fluence.  It is!  I have to take...  It isn't, when I was tagging, I basically accepted how the user perceived it, because this is what I'm looking at,  it's user perceptions.  If they say it's a problem, then that's a problem.  I had this crossover user who played Skyrim at 7 frames per second, who was perfectly happy.  And standing out in the skies, who played Hunter Strike at 100 frames per second, said it's terribly slow, I want 300.  Yeah, and that's when they said that I'm, from my point of view, looking at, you know, how happy our users are, how are they coping.  I take their word that this is okay, or this is not okay.  Question?  Yeah, I was just wondering, what are those problems?  Oh!  It looks good, I have to tell people sometimes to have applications that have been installed, some problems, and then...  It looks either they're not rendering properly, or in some cases not showing up at all.  The miss fonts basically, the application forces it on, and if it's not there, it's not going back, so you have to have the proper font installed.  And the line keeps, does the job, get the fonts and it works.  In some cases, actually font problems turned out to be actually language variable problems.  And I'm trying to run, the Japanese fonts are showing up.  If you try to run a Japanese program, but your system is set to English, it just doesn't work.  In the same fashion.  Yeah, you have to make sure that the locale of the machine matches the locale of the program.  And you can start, you know, line with the correct language variable.  Now in some cases people have done that already and the fonts still aren't showing up, and that's an actual code.  But that, starting with the line variable is one thing that's actually not documented on our site.  We have actually periodically get questions about it, but it's not in the user guide or the FAQ.  So, that's it.  So, moving on, I mean that was my statistics.  I'll talk a little bit about user support, or as I put it, dealing with people who don't follow directions.  And that's an oversimplification of course, because I'm a user myself.  To the extent that I can help people is because I read the directions and I follow directions.  But, we have a lot of information on our site.  And it's clear that people aren't reading it in many cases, because a lot of what I do is in fact some people answer to your questions here in the FAQ.  Yep, FBB.  Now, my background, you know, and I'm not a technical person, my background is a teacher.  And I tend to treat my users kind of like I treat students.  Which means, yeah, I do expect them to do their homework.  I expect them to be willing to learn.  If they're not, that's their choice, but that's, you know, have a nice day.  But I also know as a teacher that dealing with a student, I can't just say, read the textbook.  That's what you need to do.  And I also know that if a lot of students are making the same mistake, they're just not getting it.  As a teacher, I have to take a look at what I'm telling them.  Because clearly, I'm not communicating effectively.  So, in talking about, you know, not telling directions and reading stuff, I wanted to take a look at why aren't they?  And are there things that we could be doing there to make it easier for them?  The example of, you know, that problem with the bunch of page is a clear example where it was our fault when they were trying and it wasn't working.  Now, it's obviously not that we don't have enough information.  We have a wiki with 848 pages.  We have a OZILLO, which as of yesterday was up to 35,485 total bug reports, 7,700 still open.  But in terms of looking for troubleshooting, you often want to read the closed bug reports as well.  Information might be there.  It might be something, one of the problems is people filing bugs for things that were already fixed.  They're using that old version and we get to look at bugs.  The app KB where we keep user reports on performance and verities has over 12,000 in it.  And the forum has 16,782 friends.  So it's not lack of information.  Why aren't they reading all 65,000 pages?  Just there, just go read it.  Well, part of the problem, obviously the sheer volume of it,  the website is divided actually into four distinct areas, the wiki, OZILLO, app, and the forum,  which are essentially separate entities.  It may be all YH2.org, but they each have a separate login.  They have a separate search.  And so the first thing, the first thing coming in to the website has to figure out is,  which one am I going to search?  Should I be looking in the wiki, OZILLO?  Now if they come to the forum and I keep pitching the forum, they get my help and I'm pretty familiar with the website.  I sometimes think my main role is a cross between a traffic cop and a reference librarian.  So I just say, go there, you go there.  And this is the information you need.  As familiar as I am with the website, there are times when I can't find things I know are there,  because I've seen them before.  So it don't underestimate the difficulty faced by users on our website.  Now let's say they decided to search more than one.  They will sometimes find multiple pages on the same thing that don't agree with each other.  So I was putting together this presentation on this kind of surprise.  I mean we actually have four different sets of instructions on how to file a bug.  They don't say the same thing.  In some cases they directly contradict each other.  And so what a user is going to do if they're coming in to file a bug and they've never filed a bug before,  they're not a technical person, is they're parking the pen at which set of instructions they happen to read.  And if they happen to read more than one, there's a very real danger they're just going to discount all of them  and do what they think best.  Or they're going to pick and choose pieces.  I mean they're going to call this best they can.  But this is why I think in part, and I wanted to focus in part on bugs,  because users, obviously inexperienced users, file them.  It causes problems because they file bug reports that no one could possibly even attempt to fix  because it doesn't have the information needed to even think about it.  Or it's a duplicate, invalid, they're using an old version of wine, they didn't read the instructions,  or which set, or they read the wrong set of instructions.  So we're not, like, this is a sort of a job that you can recruit people as volunteers to work on, right?  It doesn't require skilled wine, but like fixing this could be done by,  there are many people in the world who can fix this, right?  And we're wine hacking is harder.  Have we just not attracted those volunteers? Are we doing something wrong?  Is it, I mean is it just...  Well we have the person that we did a lot of migrating stuff to the weekend, cleaned up the weekend,  but it's a lot of work.  Did we not buy them on a beer? I mean what?  We didn't invite them, so...  Why not?  Yeah, are we...  Well, okay, this one is the wiki one and that's probably the best one, the most up to date.  And in terms of users actually filing bugs,  that's the user guide.  This is the one above, it's on the 1HQ, the main page.  So if users were going to Bugzilla, that's what they would see.  Now, that's a lot shorter than this, and I think part of the issue is people are not actually reading this.  People of triage bugs would like them to read this and they're not,  and that's actually one of the things I wanted to address is why I think they're not.  So what I wanted to do was...  Here we have it.  So here is the main page here, folks.  So the file bug is the first thing I see that says,  before you record, go please make sure you've completed the following steps.  This looks like the instructions.  So let's pretend I'm a new user, you know, I'm not technical,  I'm a reasonably intelligent person who reads what's in front of me and tries to follow the instructions,  but I'm not experienced.  But I have a bug that's very important, and I'm recording it because  I'm told me to record something fresh, I got this nice pop-up saying,  I'm a bug, and you have a nice little capture back trace.  And I wanted to walk through these steps from the point of view of someone who's never filed a bug.  So first step, create a login account.  Well that's easy, I can do that.  Create the logins on the website, so I go ahead and do it.  Step two, use the available bug list.  This list shows the submitted bugs that have not been assigned to anyone yet.  If you want to work on a bug, this is the place to start looking.  So I, you know, I just installed Ubuntu ten minutes ago.  That doesn't seem relevant, you know.  Now there's a link there, and so, you know, well I can click a link.  And, okay, there it is.  There's the available bug list.  It's limited to 500, well, I could see all of them if I wanted to see all 7700,  but that's not, that takes a while.  So as a user of, maybe, you know, this is, why is this even in there?  Reporting a bug.  The problem is as a user, that step teaches the user is that some of these instructions are not necessary or relevant to filing bugs.  And I'm going to re-order that because I'm going to tell the person who learns from what I'm doing.  So we've gone through that. Now, step three.  Make sure you are using the latest stable version or build from Git, comma,  if similar bugs have recently been fixed in a minute.  Yeah, okay, so I'm an English teacher, so I'm going to tell you that comma does not belong there.  But forgive me, we're getting really short on time, kind of wanted to give you a warning, and I know you're...  And I don't want to stop you because what I want you to do is get this fixed,  but we are getting low on time, so I kind of want to see if we can accelerate this.  Okay, all right.  We want to look at if we're rigid on our schedule, but I do need to...  All right, so just looking at that grammar aside, and it's an atrocious sentence.  If similar bugs have been fixed and committed, how on earth am I supposed to know that?  If I click on Git, it leads me to another page that tells me how to maintain my patches using Git.  So I know that doesn't apply.  So that leaves me with the latest stable version, which that I can understand as a user,  and I'll go and my package manager will tell me that 1.4.1 isn't even the latest stable version.  And so I'll go on to read our tips on bug-continued support.  Now, I'm here to report a bug, and I've already gone through a couple of things  that I know aren't related to reporting bugs, so I say,  well, this has nothing to do with me.  I'll just skip that because I'm getting tired of having her in.  I don't want to file this bug.  This link is what leads to that page that has the actual accurate information that people should be following.  They're going to skip because it doesn't look like it has anything to do with reporting a bug,  and you've already explained them that some of this stuff doesn't.  Then read the FAQ and you might do that.  Submit only unknown bugs.  You actually have two conflicting links that lead to different places.  This one will actually lead you to finally submitting the bug.  So we have a series of instructions, half of which have nothing to do with actually reporting a bug.  And it's set up in a way to train people to, in fact, ignore the turn of our expectations.  And that's why they're doing it.  So it's easy to say, well, users are inexperienced, stupid, they're not following directions,  but in fact, we're training them.  They are, in fact, intelligent people who are doing what we're teaching them to do.  That's my point.  Who is going to fix this page?  Do we have any of the bugzilla elements?  You're going to fix it?  All right.  Yes.  Yes.  Yes.  Yes.  Yes.  Did you have anything else you wanted to get to?  No, that's it.  That's it?  Yes.  Thank you.
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Alright, everyone, welcome. I'd like to introduce Roseanne Mezze, who is the premier forum wine developer. So she is the hero, heroine to all of us wine developers, because she keeps them away from us. The users away from us. While we're calling out heroes, I think it's important to celebrate Giv's work. Our friend Bela, who has done an enormous amount of work in Bugsillo over the last year. So I think we should thank them all for their help. So thank you guys. I think you have some slides, but if I recall right, it's kind of QA, like you're happy to be interrupted, and then it's more of a listening to me shaped. So Karen is going to kind of give her walls to the first one. I'm not a performer really. But you need to speak as loud as you can. Okay, so my title is Wine User Experience, and I want to talk about, first a little bit, who our users are. Last year when I could generally talk about users, I got the sense that people were interested in who our users are. What proportion you use, the stature, what proportion you have, these problems. And I could, because I read the forum, I could of course give my impressions, but this is just what I remember, the memory is imperfect. So this year I got ambitious and decided I was going to try and take our scientific look at it. So I actually scraped the forum for last year, and I didn't have time to tag the whole year. I just got this bright idea and I didn't do anything. But there were 815 threads created on the forum between July 1st and December 31st of last year. And I systematically went to the paddock on which was this that I was interested in trying to figure out how to statistically. As well as anything that started to look interesting as I was rereading that stuff. It's kind of experimental, it's maybe not the most scientific approach, but it's my first stab at trying to quantify some information. Because of course on the forum there's a great deal of information about what our users are experiencing, but it's in a very messy kind of format. So the first thing to keep in mind, the first thing I looked at is why are they closed? And it's important as I go through the other statistics to keep in mind that this group I'm looking at are people with problems overwhelmingly. We don't hear from people for whom wine is working perfectly. I mean once in a while, once a year, someone will post on the forum, you're doing a great job, it's wonderful, we love you. But three quarters of our posters on the forum have a specific problem they want to solve. A lot of people have a question as opposed to a specific problem. And it's usually, most of those are how-to questions, how do I do this in one? Some of them are also the next biggest group of questions are does this app work in wine before I buy a situation? And then there's the small group of random other reasons for posting. Often suggestions, I should do this, which being users admittedly often the suggestions are simply naive. Why don't we raise money to pay developers to do this? I'm sure the developers were love, but of course users don't have a clue how expensive that is. So, you know, I will give you 50 bucks to write this patch. They're well-mean. I also looked at what operating system they're using. Now, there's 98, we don't require people to identify that, but because we now have specific Linux and Mac subforms, even if they don't tell us what they're using, we know by what they've posted. So, of our four users, again, three quarters, our analytics, Mac users are about 12 and a half percent, and we had two lonely free BSD users. And that's about typical, you know, we get a couple free BSD users a year. I will say only the Mac users, proportionally, are underrepresented, and the reason is most Mac users are in fact using third-party apps to run line, and that's not supported in our form, and in fact we have a sticky at the top of the form thing. We don't support these things, and essentially, are telling them they'll post it. So, I suspect there are probably more Mac users out there, certainly than proportionally, but they're not going to come to our forum for help. I also looked at other people who use Linux, what these are, to the extent that, again, they identified it. Many didn't, but proportionally, Ubuntu and derivatives, other than Linux Mint, are the biggest group. I simply counted Linux Mint separately because they're big enough to be counted separately. They're our second biggest group. We have a little bit of a wide-debate, and then that little wedge of other, and a breakdown of how it worked out. The other other is, their distros, but they were fewer than 10 people to end posts, so I just lumped them together. So this kind of, obviously, Ubuntu dominates here. Keep in mind, this is a group we're talking about, a group that has problems, as opposed to a group that is representative of all our users. So one can speculate, you know, why Ubuntu users seem to have more problems. I think one of the factors is that Ubuntu is marketed to newbies. They have a higher proportion of newbies in general, and the other groups that have fewer people, these tend to be more experienced than other users, who are able to solve their own problems. So even if they have problems, they're not necessarily coming to us for help. Whereas Ubuntu users, what we see on the forum, you know, or I think last year I said, are typical users. It's just finished installing Ubuntu, and now wants to play World of Warcraft. And they're not even quite sure how to use their package manager. So I think that's a big reason why we see so many Ubuntu users. And I think, again, I don't think they're necessarily that dominant in terms of all users. It's just that they're that dominant in terms of who we're hearing from, as promised. I also took a look at what version of wine they're using. And now not everybody identifies that actually only about 54% actually identify the version of wine. And in the group, you know, starting at the top, 1.7, which came out in August, 1.6 came out in July. Previous development released 1.5, previous stable release 1.4, and pre 1.4, 10 people, I lumped them all together. There are always random people who are using ancient versions of wine. The general reasons for that are either they're on a very old de-spoil and there are literally no new packages for it, or they have an app that needs an old version of wine. Often they have an old patch, never made it into wine. Their app depends on it, so they literally have to use this agent to burn the wine around this specific point. Now, looking at this, it looks like, kind of like the current development release is about equal in usage to the current stable release, kind of 50-50. That's misleading. You'll see on the next chart. But keep in mind that the time period I looked at includes the two weeks when 1.6 first came out and it was literally the newest release. So people who normally use the development branch and update every two weeks were of course using the 1.6 at that point. And so that's artificially caught. Now, having read the form, I feel there was a particular problem with the 1.6 branch. And the next chart shows usage by month. And I'm assuming you did this. 1.5 is at the bottom of that. It goes down. That blue line, 1.6. Usage was at its high point when it was released, which is not surprising to me yet, as I said. People who normally use the development branch were also using that. So that initial drop is expected when 1.7 comes out because that group jumped to this. What's unexpected is the nose dive. 1.6 takes between August and September. And by the end of the year, it's actually below usage of the previous stable release. And this is something for those of us who do use their support, not just on the forum, but also in the OZILO in terms of triaging loss. It's been driving us crazy. Because... Maybe because in Ubuntu it's still 1.4 by default? Yes. That's what I was getting to. That is exactly what happened. Ubuntu shipped 13.10 with 1.4 by default. We're talking about, of course, newbies who don't necessarily know there even is something other than what their DSTRO's repository has. So they installed 13.10, they installed 1.4 by default, thinking they have the newest version of Wine. They run into a problem. Hopefully they come on the forum where we're equipped to deal with these kind of newbie problems. But unfortunately, a lot of them have, in fact, been filing blows from 1.41. They told to retest. They fined this fixed of course. It fixed a long time ago. And, you know, then they go through having to upgrade. So that's been a problem for the past few months, literally. In terms of... But it shows how dependent users, particularly inexperienced ones, are on their packages. And what their users are doing. In this case it's not the user's fault. They don't know any better. This is their package manager told them they had the newest version. And to be fair, whenever someone goes out to go to a forum, they're wondering why not. What they're told to do is, app get installed this. So when you're going to go get Wine, app get installed Wine, and then you have 1.4. And now you're stuck. And that's what they're told to do. So, is this... Scott didn't update this package fast enough? I mean, what's the issue here? I mean, I can't because it's not the end of October and when the 206 came out. How much later? I think it was too late to change the package. The decision which package they used was a relief. And that's, you know, small part fixes. In the way. And change the package to a newer version. This is not allowed in the short time before release. And after the release, you have to take a big way to get the package update in the same release. That's a good time. 1.6 came out in July. And that's too... Which time it is? OpenSUSA managed to ship... Maybe it was a time before, for example, when Scott has holiday in this summer time, for example, just in this time, when he comes back, maybe he's a deadline over, don't know. Yeah, I don't know the reasons. I just know it's causing us problems. And this is abnormal to have the stable release drop that much. Now, Development Branch is, as expected, going up. Part of the reason it's going up is the other big thing that happened last year is the December scheme update basically brought all versions of wine prior to that. It was fixed in the Development Branch within one day. Why not? You guys are superheroes sometimes. Seriously. I mean, you can't ask for anything better than that. But of course, I spend a lot of time on the forum, refutably telling people, you know, if I take the one place that was planned, then it's on the next. It was updated in the Development Branch right away. That wasn't backcourted to the stable branch until like, 4.6.22, which just came out. Not too long ago. So, again, that's also taking from people who perhaps may have preferred to stay with the stable branch. They could use 1.6, but of course, meaning to play their games takes precedence over everything. So, we have a sharper downturn. One question. What distributions do you use like the stable branch except even the deviant? Because I know Fedora is still, you know, the time frame, so they take whatever it is. You know, the decision to have this two branch system was made before I ever became involved in wine, but I know there are different opinions. As someone who does user support, I am endlessly telling people to upgrade to the latest development. I mean, there's a certain kind of a race period after the new stable branch comes out. I'll give, you know, for maybe a month or so, I'll say, well, a great addition to the latest stable branch. But then I start to see that there are bugs even in the latest stable branch that have been fixed in the development branch. So, let's say, at that point, I start telling people automatically to try to buy a stable branch. It's a problem helping users, because those of us who have helped users were experienced users. We're using the development branch. And as it goes further in time, I don't even remember what was my six-plus-luck. I'm based. Well, the thing is you don't know how many users are happily using the stable release. Yeah, we don't. Oh, yeah, that's true. Yeah, I said that's true. We don't. We don't. So, I think we can effectively say that the steam, the whole line of steam users were very unhappy, at least until it was backported, but we don't know now that it's been backported to the stable branch. They may be perfectly happy. Now, people have a misconception about the stable branch. They said this last year to users the word stable means it doesn't crash. And, of course, that's not true. What do you mean it's not true? In general, people find the stable branch crashes more than the development branch. In particular, they're using 1.4.1. And the reason for that, the reason I'm particularly frustrated at 1.7 is that one point four was a voice down on one to users is that the VC, why is VC run in 1.4.1 was not yet ready, complete enough to run multiple apps. That was fixed by about 1.5.9. So, we're still, you know, seeing in these 1.4 people are seeing crashes in unimplicated functions that were implemented 18 months ago. And so, you know, my end, that's what has me frustrated with trying to help people because it was a needless problem, you know, if they'd been given 1.6, they wouldn't be seeing these crashes. Maybe stable is the wrong word. I mean, slow, stable. Actually, if your application works, I mean, don't change the lines. Hold it, you have to. You know, for those of us, again, who? Six months or a year ago, this is a duplicate. So, it's creating unnecessary work for the non-developer volunteers, like me. We should have aims over here, future fixed goodies. Okay, the next thing I looked at is third-party apps with the most controversial things. Many of our users, this is basically people who mentioned having used a third-party app prior to, you know, posting wine tricks, biggest usage, not surprisingly, it's the only one that's kind of semi-supported on our forum. I said it's controversial because, you know, officially, we only support plain wine. You're only supposed to foul bugs. And even on the forum, you're only supposed to use plain wine. We accept wine tricks simply because those of us who do the help mostly use it occasionally ourselves. And, you know, for my speaking, for myself, sometimes some of the questions about wine tricks are, in fact, problems with wine tricks, not with wine. I'll answer it if I know the answer off the top of my head, otherwise it's generally recorded to the guys at WineTrips.org. The second most common one is this play analytics, again, controversial, and people who are told to try plain wine and then get back to us. As mattering of others, WineBodler, WineSkin, and obviously, PlanetMac are actually all MAC wrappers. And this is definitely, as I said, under-representative in terms of people who are actually out there using these wrappers because specifically, we have a sticky at the top of the forum telling them that WineBodler and WineSkin are not supported here. So we're, you know, just not getting close to people. And Q for Wine is when you were one, and we are hearing about pipe wine. We're occasionally getting people asking for our help, and, you know, I refer them to your... And I look, by the way, at your support, it looks very good to you. And in fact, I'd recommend pipe like to some of our users to say, well, I can't get some of that like to work in wine after a minute. Because they have the best bet is pipe wine, so go down. So, but yeah, the third party app is a controversial one because for those of us who do support, people come in having totally messed up their wine freefix by installing a bunch of made of VMLs and making other changes. And in the case of plan, when it's possible using a patched version of wine that's not supported. And we're the bad guys who have to deal with it. So I know you can't do this. You won't talk to you unless you use plain wine. Okay, problems building wine. I looked at specific kinds of problems and talked, and I went to who has problems building wine. Not surprisingly, Debbie is at the top of people who have problems building wine. Most of our users are using packages, but, you know, there are people who for various reasons try to build it. Usually the main reasons for wanting build wine instead of using a distro packages is that the distro packages are out of date or there even aren't any. Sometimes it is because they want to use a patched version of wine. And sometimes it's actually because they want to run a regression test. So the reasons for Debbie and having such problems are multi-archs, of course, the difficulty of getting 32 big dependencies. But there's another reason that our instructions for building wine on Debbie and on our Wiki predate the move to multi-archs. They're totally useless for current Debbie and... Well, they're useful for people using really old versions of Debbie. We have seriously had people pleading with me for help, and I don't use Debbie in. I'm not qualified to give them advice. So if anybody out here uses Debbie in and knows how to build wine on Debbie, and if you could take the time to update our Wiki, your fellow Debbie and users would be very grateful, and I would be very grateful to you as well, because then I would have some accurate up-to-date information to point our users to. Why do you suppose that that problem with multi-arch is more common on Debbie than on Ubuntu, which also uses multi-arch? Ubuntu doesn't build packages. Ubuntu users don't build packages. They don't, but we also have somebody did pull, and I think it was actually Dan Kago, posted up-to-date instructions for building wine on Ubuntu. And it's literally what it comes down to. People have said they have searched the entire web and couldn't find up-to-date instructions for building Debbie, and now I actually found a blog that looked like it knew what it was talking about, and I literally have been referring users to this blog entry. Nobody said it didn't work. Of course, the other problem is people don't always give me feedback one way or the other. But at this point, I'm pointing people to an external blog that seems to know what it's talking about, and I hope it does. But I don't like doing that. Ideally, these kind of instructions should be on our website. Copying pasted from the other website. If somebody could verify, somebody knowledgeable about building on Debbie, and could actually verify to me that this actually is the accurate way to do it. Well, did the users came back to you? They didn't. I mean, that's part of the problem. The problem is I don't know. The problem with dealing with users is the disappearing user. So, you know, you give them a suggestion and never hear from them again, and maybe that's because it worked and they're happy, and maybe it's because they gave up, and maybe it's because they found a different solution elsewhere, or maybe they died. I don't know. That's a lot of problems. But yeah, Debbie is the bigger... The second one is actually sent us, and I was actually, myself, surprised that we had that many, for some reason, it's been sticking in my memory as being that big a thing, but they actually have a similar problem in getting up-to-date information as well as packages to satisfy dependencies. That's why. Yeah, the other problem is that Alexan allows to break that. So, you're the one. Well, again, most of the users who come on the forum are not building one. I'm just, you know, I looked at it because obviously if you can't even install a line, then, you know, you can't even get to further problems. So, I also looked at problems installing a package, and yes, we have people who don't know how to use their package manager, but they're also in problems, and what two users are at the top. And Linux Mint also uses the same packages. So, it's overwhelmingly in that group when people have any problems installing packages. Part of it is user experience, but it's not entirely in their fault. The problems were clustered in September and December. In September, as I recall, there actually was a broken bunch of package up there briefly that simply wouldn't be installed. And so, yeah, they came out of it. In December, the problem turned out to be our instructions on our website for adding the PPA. We have this nice little page that looks like, you know, completely idiot-proof. We have nice pictures. And this starting morning, copy and paste this line. Now, how could anybody screw that? They couldn't, but we did, because there was an extra space in the HTML, and because of that extra space, if they literally followed that instruction, it would not work. Now, I feel bad because we had a string of confused newbies coming out of the forum insisting they followed the instructions to the letter, and they don't work, and I'm thinking, you know, you did something wrong. I don't know what it is. I don't use Ubuntu. I don't know if Agumamn and her fellow reporters, the past retainer, are kind of brushing them off until someone, thankfully, finally figured out and filed a bug and did get fixed. I feel bad for these poor users. I didn't perhaps treat them as well, but this was our fault. What about the reports of problems since that's fixed? Oh, we haven't...actually, something did have a problem. I mean, we always had...again, because a big part of this is user experience, we're always going to get some people who just point, you don't know how to use the package. We on the forum, I refer them to the DSTRO because package managers are so different from DSTRO to DSTRO. I can help them with OpenSusa. That's what I use, but I don't have a clue how functions are in Biosk. So, we generally refer them to their DSTRO forum, and we actually...the guidelines for our forum are the knowledge, basic knowledge of how to use your operating system. The operating system is assumed that you're experienced. The reality is that description fits the people answering the questions. It does not generally fit the people asking the questions. But, you know, there's a balance we have to strike because we are not a general how to use Linux forum, and we can easily become one because of the nature of our user base, because they are people who just switch from Windows to very inexperienced and need a lot of help. So, at some point, we have to draw a line and say, no, I'm not teaching you how to use your package manager. You have to go back to DSTRO. But this was definitely our fault. Seems like a bunch of you could sanitize these or something like that. You know that having a space with a meeting should show up from the mysterious error that you can't figure out. Okay, so I also tried to tag threads for problems running online, and granted, problems are all over the place. But the key word that came up most often was crash, possibly because something that serious is more likely to get people actually seeking help. Graphics was second. Running an installer that failed was third, and we're going to kind of surprise me that it was that high was fonts. And then I just put up stuff that had at least ten input devices, including laptop altogether, keyboard, mouse, tablet, then mono.net, sound, networking, and performance. And this was actually things that I tagged as problems, not questions. The one, in most cases, the numbers are the same. They were basically all problems. Performance is the one area that actually had almost as many questions as problems. And how did I make the distinction? Well, in performance, performance is so bad you can't play this game, as opposed to... It's perfectly playable, but I want to, every last frame per second, I can get. And so we have definitely a group of hardcore gamers who, what, every last frame per second, as opposed to... This represents the people who say, you know, this is so bad, it's unplayable. So that's kind of a, you know, general range of the kinds of problems users are remembering. My experience is that the distinction between some playable and their best performance, I can get this kind of fluence. It is! I have to take... It isn't, when I was tagging, I basically accepted how the user perceived it, because this is what I'm looking at, it's user perceptions. If they say it's a problem, then that's a problem. I had this crossover user who played Skyrim at 7 frames per second, who was perfectly happy. And standing out in the skies, who played Hunter Strike at 100 frames per second, said it's terribly slow, I want 300. Yeah, and that's when they said that I'm, from my point of view, looking at, you know, how happy our users are, how are they coping. I take their word that this is okay, or this is not okay. Question? Yeah, I was just wondering, what are those problems? Oh! It looks good, I have to tell people sometimes to have applications that have been installed, some problems, and then... It looks either they're not rendering properly, or in some cases not showing up at all. The miss fonts basically, the application forces it on, and if it's not there, it's not going back, so you have to have the proper font installed. And the line keeps, does the job, get the fonts and it works. In some cases, actually font problems turned out to be actually language variable problems. And I'm trying to run, the Japanese fonts are showing up. If you try to run a Japanese program, but your system is set to English, it just doesn't work. In the same fashion. Yeah, you have to make sure that the locale of the machine matches the locale of the program. And you can start, you know, line with the correct language variable. Now in some cases people have done that already and the fonts still aren't showing up, and that's an actual code. But that, starting with the line variable is one thing that's actually not documented on our site. We have actually periodically get questions about it, but it's not in the user guide or the FAQ. So, that's it. So, moving on, I mean that was my statistics. I'll talk a little bit about user support, or as I put it, dealing with people who don't follow directions. And that's an oversimplification of course, because I'm a user myself. To the extent that I can help people is because I read the directions and I follow directions. But, we have a lot of information on our site. And it's clear that people aren't reading it in many cases, because a lot of what I do is in fact some people answer to your questions here in the FAQ. Yep, FBB. Now, my background, you know, and I'm not a technical person, my background is a teacher. And I tend to treat my users kind of like I treat students. Which means, yeah, I do expect them to do their homework. I expect them to be willing to learn. If they're not, that's their choice, but that's, you know, have a nice day. But I also know as a teacher that dealing with a student, I can't just say, read the textbook. That's what you need to do. And I also know that if a lot of students are making the same mistake, they're just not getting it. As a teacher, I have to take a look at what I'm telling them. Because clearly, I'm not communicating effectively. So, in talking about, you know, not telling directions and reading stuff, I wanted to take a look at why aren't they? And are there things that we could be doing there to make it easier for them? The example of, you know, that problem with the bunch of page is a clear example where it was our fault when they were trying and it wasn't working. Now, it's obviously not that we don't have enough information. We have a wiki with 848 pages. We have a OZILLO, which as of yesterday was up to 35,485 total bug reports, 7,700 still open. But in terms of looking for troubleshooting, you often want to read the closed bug reports as well. Information might be there. It might be something, one of the problems is people filing bugs for things that were already fixed. They're using that old version and we get to look at bugs. The app KB where we keep user reports on performance and verities has over 12,000 in it. And the forum has 16,782 friends. So it's not lack of information. Why aren't they reading all 65,000 pages? Just there, just go read it. Well, part of the problem, obviously the sheer volume of it, the website is divided actually into four distinct areas, the wiki, OZILLO, app, and the forum, which are essentially separate entities. It may be all YH2.org, but they each have a separate login. They have a separate search. And so the first thing, the first thing coming in to the website has to figure out is, which one am I going to search? Should I be looking in the wiki, OZILLO? Now if they come to the forum and I keep pitching the forum, they get my help and I'm pretty familiar with the website. I sometimes think my main role is a cross between a traffic cop and a reference librarian. So I just say, go there, you go there. And this is the information you need. As familiar as I am with the website, there are times when I can't find things I know are there, because I've seen them before. So it don't underestimate the difficulty faced by users on our website. Now let's say they decided to search more than one. They will sometimes find multiple pages on the same thing that don't agree with each other. So I was putting together this presentation on this kind of surprise. I mean we actually have four different sets of instructions on how to file a bug. They don't say the same thing. In some cases they directly contradict each other. And so what a user is going to do if they're coming in to file a bug and they've never filed a bug before, they're not a technical person, is they're parking the pen at which set of instructions they happen to read. And if they happen to read more than one, there's a very real danger they're just going to discount all of them and do what they think best. Or they're going to pick and choose pieces. I mean they're going to call this best they can. But this is why I think in part, and I wanted to focus in part on bugs, because users, obviously inexperienced users, file them. It causes problems because they file bug reports that no one could possibly even attempt to fix because it doesn't have the information needed to even think about it. Or it's a duplicate, invalid, they're using an old version of wine, they didn't read the instructions, or which set, or they read the wrong set of instructions. So we're not, like, this is a sort of a job that you can recruit people as volunteers to work on, right? It doesn't require skilled wine, but like fixing this could be done by, there are many people in the world who can fix this, right? And we're wine hacking is harder. Have we just not attracted those volunteers? Are we doing something wrong? Is it, I mean is it just... Well we have the person that we did a lot of migrating stuff to the weekend, cleaned up the weekend, but it's a lot of work. Did we not buy them on a beer? I mean what? We didn't invite them, so... Why not? Yeah, are we... Well, okay, this one is the wiki one and that's probably the best one, the most up to date. And in terms of users actually filing bugs, that's the user guide. This is the one above, it's on the 1HQ, the main page. So if users were going to Bugzilla, that's what they would see. Now, that's a lot shorter than this, and I think part of the issue is people are not actually reading this. People of triage bugs would like them to read this and they're not, and that's actually one of the things I wanted to address is why I think they're not. So what I wanted to do was... Here we have it. So here is the main page here, folks. So the file bug is the first thing I see that says, before you record, go please make sure you've completed the following steps. This looks like the instructions. So let's pretend I'm a new user, you know, I'm not technical, I'm a reasonably intelligent person who reads what's in front of me and tries to follow the instructions, but I'm not experienced. But I have a bug that's very important, and I'm recording it because I'm told me to record something fresh, I got this nice pop-up saying, I'm a bug, and you have a nice little capture back trace. And I wanted to walk through these steps from the point of view of someone who's never filed a bug. So first step, create a login account. Well that's easy, I can do that. Create the logins on the website, so I go ahead and do it. Step two, use the available bug list. This list shows the submitted bugs that have not been assigned to anyone yet. If you want to work on a bug, this is the place to start looking. So I, you know, I just installed Ubuntu ten minutes ago. That doesn't seem relevant, you know. Now there's a link there, and so, you know, well I can click a link. And, okay, there it is. There's the available bug list. It's limited to 500, well, I could see all of them if I wanted to see all 7700, but that's not, that takes a while. So as a user of, maybe, you know, this is, why is this even in there? Reporting a bug. The problem is as a user, that step teaches the user is that some of these instructions are not necessary or relevant to filing bugs. And I'm going to re-order that because I'm going to tell the person who learns from what I'm doing. So we've gone through that. Now, step three. Make sure you are using the latest stable version or build from Git, comma, if similar bugs have recently been fixed in a minute. Yeah, okay, so I'm an English teacher, so I'm going to tell you that comma does not belong there. But forgive me, we're getting really short on time, kind of wanted to give you a warning, and I know you're... And I don't want to stop you because what I want you to do is get this fixed, but we are getting low on time, so I kind of want to see if we can accelerate this. Okay, all right. We want to look at if we're rigid on our schedule, but I do need to... All right, so just looking at that grammar aside, and it's an atrocious sentence. If similar bugs have been fixed and committed, how on earth am I supposed to know that? If I click on Git, it leads me to another page that tells me how to maintain my patches using Git. So I know that doesn't apply. So that leaves me with the latest stable version, which that I can understand as a user, and I'll go and my package manager will tell me that 1.4.1 isn't even the latest stable version. And so I'll go on to read our tips on bug-continued support. Now, I'm here to report a bug, and I've already gone through a couple of things that I know aren't related to reporting bugs, so I say, well, this has nothing to do with me. I'll just skip that because I'm getting tired of having her in. I don't want to file this bug. This link is what leads to that page that has the actual accurate information that people should be following. They're going to skip because it doesn't look like it has anything to do with reporting a bug, and you've already explained them that some of this stuff doesn't. Then read the FAQ and you might do that. Submit only unknown bugs. You actually have two conflicting links that lead to different places. This one will actually lead you to finally submitting the bug. So we have a series of instructions, half of which have nothing to do with actually reporting a bug. And it's set up in a way to train people to, in fact, ignore the turn of our expectations. And that's why they're doing it. So it's easy to say, well, users are inexperienced, stupid, they're not following directions, but in fact, we're training them. They are, in fact, intelligent people who are doing what we're teaching them to do. That's my point. Who is going to fix this page? Do we have any of the bugzilla elements? You're going to fix it? All right. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Did you have anything else you wanted to get to? No, that's it. That's it? Yes. Thank you.
group that is representative of all our users. So going to go get Wine, app get installed Wine, and