Addressed to the community: Suggestion to help the Linux Mint developers a little bit

[PurpleSmurf2]

I have often read from developers that it is sometimes very time-consuming or even impossible to reproduce errors when they have been reported as bugs. This is partly due to the fact that the bug reports are often not particularly helpful and important details are concealed, whether on purpose or out of ignorance.

If you can spare a little time, why not rummage through the many issue reports and try to reproduce one or two bug reports and, if necessary, add helpful information, videos and images. This will probably also help the developers and in the end we will all benefit from a better operating system. :-)

[JosephMcc]

The best thing most people can do? If you are a Mint user, use the Mint forums to help troubleshoot your issue first. See if it's actually a bug or something else. If it is a bug, you will have had some help narrowing it down to a specific and reproducable cause.

[PurpleSmurf2]

I am also pretty sure that many issue reports can be closed because they are not bugs but feature requests. If you clean them out a bit, you can concentrate a bit more on the important things. If you then close those that provide insufficient information, the whole thing becomes quite manageable.

[JosephMcc]

the whole thing becomes quite manageable.

I used to dedicate a good bit of time to doing just that. Then people freak out and get an attitude if it doesn't go the way they want. I have better things to do with my free time than deal with that. Less headache to just leave them there most of the time. It is probably the most thankless job anyone can do. I have a lot of respect for people like the Mint forum moderators just because of this.

[PurpleSmurf2]

In my experience, this is often a communication problem. If the person who closes the bug report gives a small explanation as to why the report was closed, that is enough for many people. For example, a copy and paste answer that says something like “Closed because it is not a bug but a feature request”. Of course there are always a few people who are unhappy with everything and complain. But at a certain age you should get over it and ignore it :-)

[Fantu]

Unfortunately, as I have seen from long experience in the IT field most users when it comes to reporting problems are terrible. In many cases you simply hear "it doesn't work" or similar, in fact something absolutely useless (except for some rare cases in which there is something that at that moment and conditions does not work at all). Regarding Linux and/or open source projects (unlike windows and closed source software), the reports are generally better but for the most part they remain of little or none use.

What I think users should read and improve:

• when you have a problem do a search first (often you find the answer and the solution), and when you report it you also have to always do a search first. This often saves time and also saves time for those who provide assistance or contribute to the project. By not opening duplicates but by replying to existing reports on the same topic you also have more chances to find and share possible workarounds, keep up to date on the status etc...
• poor and/or bad/incorrect information: making reports with no, almost no, lacking, incomplete information etc can make the report useless (or almost), cause your own time to be wasted and also cause the time of those who read it and would like to help to be wasted.
• do not respond when more information is requested. those who want to help spend time reading, responding, doing any tests and research. not responding in addition to having wasted other people's time can also discourage them from helping with other reports or do it in a faster and more superficial way to save time
• do not update and close report if the problem has been solved or a workaround has been found. Letting people know that the problem is solved or reporting any workarounds can help other users and those who contribute

What can do anyone want to contribute, as normal user:

• read reports, reply if you know additional information (not already written by others), about solving the problem, working around it, report if there are duplicates (which may have more information)
• if you have enough experience you could also help with any debugging, being able to gather enough information can often help save a lot of time for developers who can solve the problem

What can do the Mint team:

• give some limited permissions to users who are very involved in helping, maybe even just in reports and are competent enough so that they can help close resolved, duplicate or other reports and also bring some reports to attention with enough information to not waste the developers' time
• try to see if there are further improvements to be made to the reporting templates (or add them, since they are only in some repositories) based on the common problems encountered

There are also some automatic operations that can help, i don't know enough in detail but for example I know that something can be done at least for inactive issues:
https://docs.github.com/en/actions/use-cases-and-examples/project-management/closing-inactive-issues
Maybe you could do it only for very old issues, for example without answers for 5 years, label them as stale, send an automatic message asking to answer if that issue is still necessary, if the problem is still present, if it has been solved or with workaround (in that case it would be good for the author to close it), if there are no answers for 30 days after the stale close it, otherwise remove the stale.
Then I don't know if it's possible to add a label to the issues that require additional information and if there are no new answers close after a certain amount (for example 90 days), there's something similar on launchpad but I haven't looked for if it can be done with github.
if it were possible I think it could save a bit of time for those who can manage the reports.

There are other things that could be said but unfortunately I don't have much time, I hope there is something useful in this message that I wrote quite quickly