When you’re talking to an open source dev, just remember that they are literally giving you their time for free, and they are people who don’t like to be treated poorly.

Edit: Just to be clear, I don’t mean any ill will toward the guy. He’s frustrated and he’s just taking it out in the wrong venue at the wrong people, but that doesn’t mean he’s a bad person.

Edit 2: The reinstalling he’s talking about is NPM. So just running npm install. It’s because he tried removing the node_modules directory, which is a reasonable thing to do, but it means you need to reinstall the modules with that command.

  • naevaTheRat@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    2104·
    6 months ago

    Me approaching Foss developer with bug: Pardon me, if you could grace this lowly worm with but a moment of your attention; I with me a bug report, and I believe I have found the section of code responsible. This inadequate being lacks the technical expertise to fix it and would be eternally indebted if you would turn your monumental skills upon its trifling problems. It would please me immensely if my paltry efforts were of some assistance.

    This user: SOFTWARE NO WORK FUCK YOU!

    • ggppjj@lemmy.world
      831·
      6 months ago

      And yet, this is the issue that gets a response instead of a silent closed offtopic wontfix.

        • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          31·
          6 months ago

          You’ve clearly never worked with any psychopaths or narcissists. Often, pointed (though importantly, carefully offline and undocumented) cruelty is one of the only ways to effectively punch back and make people like that stop trying to fuck with you, because many people like that only really respond to threat dynamics. It’s not terribly common, and it’s not fun to do, but it definitely is warranted once in a blue moon.

      • NotJustForMe@lemmy.ml
        221·
        6 months ago

        Or even worse:

        Thanks. Send a complete log of every software on your system, two videos of the bugs in action, and a detailed analysis of what you’ve had for breakfast.

      • hperrin@lemmy.worldOP
        101·
        6 months ago

        It is, until it isn’t. I’ve seen devs delete or abandon their projects because of too mush abuse. Nobody likes being yelled at. (Unless that’s your kink. I won’t judge.)

  • Grain9325@lemmy.ml
    77·
    6 months ago

    And here I am anxious thinking I might offend the devs so I spend way too much time thinking what I’ve written is not rude

    • platypus_plumba@lemmy.world
      26·
      6 months ago

      I’ve only had beef with a single dev ever. The maintainer of Prometheus, Brian Brazil, or whatever his name is. His attitude is so shitty towards people proposing actually good ideas that would push his product forward.

      • DeltaTangoLima@reddrefuge.comEnglish
        111·
        6 months ago

        Yeah, I had the same experience with the devs of Pushbullet, after constructively suggesting a few ways they might be able to work with proxy servers, and all I got back was “Proxies are bad, mmmmk?”.

        Fucken Peter Pan-level mentality.

        • jasondj@ttrpg.network
          5·
          6 months ago

          Proxies aren’t bad they are just dated.

          Ironically the big problem with proxies is really that software doesn’t support them properly, usually due to lazy or unknowing devs.

  • mastefetri@infosec.pub
    756·
    6 months ago

    It depends on if the first guy is complaining about having to reinstall this specific software, or if the software borked his entire system to the point that he has to reinstall his entire OS. Because that happened to me once. But in the first scenario he is being a dick, and in the second one not so much.

    • hperrin@lemmy.worldOP
      74·
      6 months ago

      In this case, in trying to resolve the issue, he deleted his node_modules directory. So he’s talking about having to reinstall everything by typing npm install and waiting for it to finish.

      • FrostyCaveman@lemm.ee
        34·
        6 months ago

        oh man…

        People can be such dicks, you have my sympathy.

        I’ve been thinking about open sourcing a Node project of mine recently… concerning that this is the kind of thing to expect

        • hperrin@lemmy.worldOP
          31·
          6 months ago

          Well, this isn’t usual. This is actually really rare. Almost all of the interactions I have with users of my libraries are great. People are generally appreciative and kind, or at least not rude. This is an outlier, and I try not to let these things sour my experience.

          He’s frustrated and he’s being abrasive because of that, but that doesn’t make him a bad person. I try to respond without being rude back, but just stern. Usually when you do that, people will either not respond again or apologize. I’ve never had a user keep being rude, and if I did, I would just ban them.

          Sometimes people just kinda forget that on the internet they’re still talking to other real people, you know?

          • boeman@lemmy.world
            7·
            6 months ago

            You’re lucky. I left FOSS dev because I got tired of my free time being abused by people like the one in your post

            • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
              9·
              6 months ago

              I’ve had to adopt a two strikes policy towards these aggressive trolls, who treat you like your their personal servant, especially since they make up like <1% of ppl on issue trackers. After a warning, if they don’t play nice, then they’re out.

              It’s the only way to keep the coding experience enjoyable, and not suffer from burnout.

      • HiddenLayer5@lemmy.mlEnglish
        9·
        6 months ago

        Wait till they realize that’s literally the solution to a lot of Node related issues. It’s in its own folder for a reason.

    • appel@lemmy.ml
      429·
      6 months ago

      I disagree, in neither scenario the open source dev owes him anything. You get to use and modify the software for free, but the flip side is you are entitled to nothing.

      • RovingFox@infosec.pub
        187·
        6 months ago

        You are entitled to the truth. If the dev knows their software could have very damaging effects then that should be front and center on the software page.

        • appel@lemmy.ml
          105·
          6 months ago

          Usually it is? But ultimately it’s still your own responsibility. You did not pay the dev, the dev does not ask you to pay them, ergo the dev owes you diddly squad.

          • RovingFox@infosec.pub
            91·
            6 months ago

            Let’s be decent with each other, I don’t think my expectations are outrageous. I consider decent to make sure that the person that will use your software is aware of the dangers. And the best person to know those dangers is usually the dev.

    • onlinepersona@programming.devEnglish
      83·
      6 months ago

      No. It’s provided without warranty nor guarantee that it’ll work or even leave your system intact. That’s the core of most opensource licenses. Dev owes nobody nothing.

      CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

  • kingthrillgore@lemmy.ml
    6712·
    6 months ago

    YOU 👏 ARE 👏 NOT 👏 OWED 👏 CUSTOMER 👏 SERVICE 👏 FOR 👏 USING 👏 THIS 👏 SOFTWARE 👏

    YOU 👏 ARE 👏 NOT 👏 OWED 👏 A 👏 WARRANTY 👏

    Don’t like it? Pay for your software :)

        • NotJustForMe@lemmy.ml
          4·
          6 months ago

          I sometimes feel like I am the only one with that file. Yes sir, I sometimes feel sad when a good piece of software doesn’t have a donation button or license to buy. Even if it does nothing.

          Ditched Windows long ago though.

          • baseless_discourse@mander.xyz
            2·
            6 months ago

            Now flathub has a built-in donate button (for some software)!

            It would be great if it is implemented in gnome software too, so I don’t need to search on flathub to donate to developers.

          • Danny M@lemmy.escapebigtech.info
            1·
            6 months ago

            Yes sir, I sometimes feel sad when a good piece of software doesn’t have a donation button or license to buy

            Yep, I feel that too. There is too much gratis software that’s actually good and I want to pay for but many FOSS developers are scared to ask for money for some reason

        • Danny M@lemmy.escapebigtech.info
          1·
          6 months ago

          I only used winrar when I was a kid. I’ve been using linux (and macos) for most of my life and before that I used 7zip for my zipping needs, so no winrar license for me.

    • ReakDuck@lemmy.ml
      61·
      6 months ago

      The nightmare just crawls out to our reality when paid software is less developed on and more buggy than free Open Source software.

      • hperrin@lemmy.worldOP
        4·
        6 months ago

        That’s because the people making it are doing it for a job rather than for the love of it. (Except me. Surely I don’t do that.)

          • CallumWells@lemmy.mlEnglish
            11·
            6 months ago

            The funny thing is that since it’s an actual word the spell checker might not be of any use to see that it might not be the word you’re actually wanting to use. And with the amount of people using “payed” instead of “paid” the dictionaries will probably include “payed” as an alternative way to conjugate “to pay” in the currency sense.

            • ReakDuck@lemmy.ml
              2·
              6 months ago

              Uh. The spell checker doesnt work on my phone either way. I got lazy to fix anything on my GrapheneOS

  • gomp@lemmy.ml
    48·
    6 months ago

    User: “I have to waste my whole life fixing this” Dev: “you are complaining that you have to spend a few minutes”

    Savage.

  • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
    41·
    6 months ago

    This is also any and all Firefox support queries in a nutshell.

    “OMG THIS BROWSER IS SO SHIT IT ALWAYS BREAKS OR GETS SLOW”… “No I have not changed anything in ˋabout:configˋ, and what I did is definitely not the source of the problem!”… “Yes with a reset config it works fine, I don’t know why, your browser is shit!”

    And it’s always the same people who do “hardening” and “privacy enhancement”, having fuck all actual clue what they’re doing but thinking they’re oh so smart. 😑

  • IgnacioM@lemmy.mlEnglish
    421·
    6 months ago

    I see this in the comments section of Skyrim mods and it pisses me off so much

    • HiddenLayer5@lemmy.mlEnglish
      482·
      6 months ago

      Worse, I see this with Fediverse platforms like Lemmy. During the initial Reddit influx so many people expected the exact level of polish and user experience as Reddit and there were tons of threads (on Lemmy itself) basically complaining how much Lemmy “sucks” compared to Reddit, despite them coming over to Lemmy because Reddit was being enshitified. Same with Mastodon when the Twitter people were coming over.

      • LordKitsuna@lemmy.world
        25·
        6 months ago

        I mean to be fair it’s still terrible. Better than the early days and in my opinion better than using Reddit which is why I’m here. But basic functionality is just awful. Trying to discover new content outside of your particular instances incredibly tedious. So many large instances won’t stop trigger happy Banning practically every other goddamn instance out there which isn’t helping. The whole thing that originally made Reddit popular was that it was an easy place to go to find almost any topic of Interest but I now have to hunt through many different instances to potentially find what I’m looking for on top of that the community for any one particular interest could easily be scattered across multiple different instances that don’t Federate with each other and if I subscribe to all of them I’m going to likely be subjected to a lot of repeating posts

        I fully understand why a lot of people were not on board with that I put up with it because I hate Reddit more than I hate that but a lot of people will not share that opinion

        • HiddenLayer5@lemmy.mlEnglish
          122·
          6 months ago

          Keep in mind though that Lemmy is very much still in open beta while Reddit has been a mature product for years now. Lemmy only started federating like two years ago, and even compared to other Fediverse platforms Lemmy is still very new. Most of the “must have” features people associate with Reddit took a while to materialize as well, in fact when Reddit launched it didn’t have subreddits or even nested comments on posts. Not saying your grievances are invalid, but give it time and things will improve as Lemmy gets more development.

          • nonfuinoncuro@lemm.ee
            7·
            6 months ago

            IIRC it always had threaded comments but yes subreddits took years. Shamefully I was very much in the anti subreddit camp and argued fiercely for tags instead like Flickr (RIP)

            Lemmy with Sync is pretty baller though not sure what everyone is complaining about.

  • NotJustForMe@lemmy.ml
    20·
    6 months ago

    Hehe, sometimes I wish that I could be snarky like that. ;) Good for you.

    I have been told by numerous people these days that there are no free things in life. I write and contribute to FOSS software, and had that exact discussion.

    Apparently, I do it to feel good, and for the prestige, a reward in itself. Also, I probably want to make up for something.

    “Doing something for free is no excuse to do it badly.”

    Some others don’t even know what “free” means." And some don’t believe it at all, that someone is paying me. Probably thinking about influencers or something. Perhaps they saw an ad somewhere and believed I’d see any of that revenue. ;)

    I just went with posting the wiki entry about FOSS, and my ko-fi page, and thanked them for their interest. The first two, because they genuinely didn’t know any better, and the third because, well, at least that one is clear. Every user is a tester. Testing is good.

  • Karna@lemmy.mlEnglish
    19·
    6 months ago

    Would it be OK if I will be that guy when ranting about NVIDIA Linux drives? Asking for a friend 😉

  • stevedidWHAT@lemmy.world
    201·
    6 months ago

    When you have blocked most of the troll instances and have no idea what’s going on in these comments

      • ArxCyberwolf@lemmy.ca
        11·
        6 months ago

        If you look at the number of comments Lemmy says there are, versus the number of comments visible, the difference is how many people from blocked instances there are.

        I’ve seen one post where it said there were 51 comments, but none would appear for me. That’s because all of the comments were from instances blocked or defederated by my instance.

  • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    194·
    6 months ago

    Being polite is better than not being polite, but the way I see it, all user complaints are valid and are better not taken personally if possible. Maybe you as the developer didn’t do anything wrong that contributed to their problem, or are not actually in a position to resolve whatever their problem is, but it’s worth keeping in mind the bigger picture: how well peoples computers work to benefit their lives.

    If someone is getting upset that they have to spend time troubleshooting, maybe because they didn’t understand something or made a mistake, there’s definitely other people going through the exact same less-than-ideal experience and not saying anything about it. That’s information about the state of how well things are working and it’s better for it to be out there in some form than not.

    • hperrin@lemmy.worldOP
      20·
      6 months ago

      Yeah, I didn’t take it personally. He’s just venting, but doing it toward the person trying to help you is unhelpful. That’s why I posted here, basically saying to remember that you’re talking to a person, not a punching bag.