This feels analogous to the old Google latency improvement story - improve performance and p99 goes up, not down, because more people are now able to use your product.
These angry customers are a symptom of having more customers; in this direction (compatibility) companies shouldn't be KPI'ing on angry customers.
It is very legitimate that high compatibility means more very obscure, low value, high cost, bug reports that are hard to classify as such. And my gosh, I hate working with rude ticket writers.
> These angry customers are a symptom of having more customers;
No, it's a symptom of having more of a very specific type of customer who is more demanding and difficult to please than your other customers.
When you don't officially support Linux, the Linux users are not surprised. It's normal for them. They find other ways to use the product.
When you do announce Linux support, you open Pandora's box of complaints. They're extra angry that you claim Linux support but it doesn't work perfectly on their unique combination of laptop, distro, display protocol, and window manager.
You gained a small number of happy customers, but picked up a disproportionately large number of angry, vocal customers in the process.
Indeed. You make anything past that the customer's problem. I have a few Ubuntu apps that needed a bit of jiggery-pokery to make them run on not-Ubuntu.
Flatpak serves a need, there are plenty of users who like it and there are probably even more who just use it without thinking much about it. Personally, I like it for a few reasons:
- Being able to install something dependency-heavy with just one package
- Sandboxing
- Getting a newer package than what my distro provides
- Being able to update apps independently of the rest of the OS
- Being able to easily install apps that my distro doesn't provide
The people who hate it, especially without giving a reason, are largely irrelevant when flatpak is filling a need for so many other people. Design for the people who are using and who like your product. Make adjustments based on their feedback. Ignore the people who just make noise.
> Design for the people who are using and who like your product. Make adjustments based on their feedback. Ignore the people who just make noise.
And how do you know the userbase for GP's specific product is all Flatpak users? In fact, based on their comment, it appears as though they are explicitly not, hence their vocal frustration.
Not the person who wrote that but i also avoid anything related to Flatpak. The reason is that it adds a lot of extra friction to anything it touches (despite what its proponents may claim), apps ignore various settings, it wastes disk space with pointless duplication and a bunch of other issues i do not remember right now (it isn't like i write those down - i just sometimes decide to try it for something exactly because i forgot all the issues i faced and somehow someone convinced me things aren't as i remember, then recoil in horror afterwards as it turns out things are as i vaguely remember -- of course the main thing i always remember is the distaste i have for the thing, not the individual microdetails that led to the distaste).
Ultimately if something isn't in my distro's repository, i try to compile it from source and if that isn't available, i just use something else.
It's superfluous, goes against unix philosophy, solves problems that don't exist in the most obnoxious ways possible, and your distro packager is certainly better.
There is a difference between mandating that your customers use one specific Linux distro which is maintained by a controversial company, and supporting all Linux distros through an imperfect-but-fully-working method.
Sure, you'll still get a few complaints from ideological purists, but there's no avoiding that regardless of what you do.