[Arnavion]

Yes. In the past users did start by reporting bugs to their distro, and the distro package maintainer then forwarded it to upstream if necessary. But lately users have become more savvy about talking to upstream directly. Probably because upstream source control has become more standardized and well-known (GitHub, etc) and easier to work with (don't have to futz with mailing lists and etiquette, just click the "New Issue" button).

It's not even specific to Bottles or Flatpaks or whatever; it happens with regular Linux software too. In the systemd tracker you'll find people complaining about issues that have been fixed in systemd's git repo, but because the people are running distros with older versions they think the issue hasn't been fixed yet.

[jeroenhd]

It's no wonder people have started to report problems upstreams because downstream bug reports rarely ever get picked up on. If they do, it's with 10 comments of "okay, try it with this" which don't work and then nothing until a bot closes the bug because a new major version came out and therefore all bugs are now no longer relevant.

Most error messages I've googled have led me to unresolved Linux bugs in various distros. Fedora users seem especially good at reporting bugs to their distro maintainers, though this does not always result in any kind of solution.

In my opinion, every distro should be allowed to ship their version of a package, but the moment packages get frozen (i.e. for LTS distros) or custom patches get added (i.e. Debian) all contact links to upstream developers should be removed immediately and replaced with the email address of the maintainer of the package. This should hopefully prevent the jwz problem while at the same time bringing the users of these distros the stable release cycle they want.

[johnny22]

I wonder how many people are like me though. I never look at the contact information in the package metadata. I just jump directly to a search engine.

If more people are like me, then that wouldn't help solve the problem at all.

[jeroenhd]

That's also fine if you specify your distro name and use your distro specific bug tracker to report your issues, unless you're pulling in the official distribution of upstream software through something like Flatpak that bypasses your system.

Even then I've found that many Flatpaks are broken on Ubuntu that work fine on Manjaro. Weird distro configurations really are a terrible burden on developers, this stuff makes me never want to publish software that gets absorbed into distros.

Mozilla was right to force Debian to rename their modified version of their browser. More packages should use such policies in my opinion, especially if they're complex to set up right like this piece of software.