Hoshino Lina (ζ˜ŸδΉƒγƒͺγƒŠ) 🩡 3D Yuri Wedding 2026!!!Apr 2

This thread is such a massive failure of the community bug reporting process.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/1s8jevj/a_message_to_fedora_devs_please_stop_interfering/

Apparently there's a small but significant fraction of users who see their browser home reset to the Fedora Home on Firefox updates or other circumstances... and they're all convinced this is some kind of evil intentional Fedora packaging feature that hijacks your preferences on every update, and that it must happen to everyone (it does not).

So far there is one known hypothesis for why this can happen (it involves Firefox Sync), but that doesn't cover all instances because some affected users claim not to use Sync. I reported this one upstream so hopefully there will be a solution soon. Nobody had until now...

Meanwhile, not a single affected user has bothered to write up reliable repro steps or follow through with maintainers on tracking down the root cause.

I've also looked at upstream bugs and found several shaped like "Firefox lost my prefs on upgrade", but none of them were followed through to a root cause either.

Of course, when Firefox loses the home page pref and it reverts to about:home, people shrug and set it back... but when Fedora Firefox does the same and it reverts to start.fedoraproject.org, it's clearly a Red Hat conspiracy to hijack people's browsers and they demand Fedora remove the default home page branding override entirely, instead of working with a developer to get the bug fixed...

Show threadlaundApr 2

@lina i can kinda understand many people not bothering, Bugzilla isn't the most intuitive if you're not used to it, plus it requires creating a account (no OAuth providers which users might already have) so its overall a hassle. Should that be a big deal? no. But its certainly a hurdle that might bounce a bunch of people. Plus, i'm not sure about fedora, but for KDE which also uses Bugzilla theres a few issues especially for non-develoeprs i've noticed with Bugzilla as a system:

  • a lot of categories (prpduct, component), and while they try to guide you through it with descriptions, that only sets the "product" not the "component" (for those, theres no guidance)
  • reporting gives me options i'm pretty sure should be exclusive to maintainers, like severity
  • no visible roles, i don't know if i'm talking to a maintainer/codeowner, a regular contributor, or a completely random person who also just signed up
  • no text formatting options, just plaintext. no markup, no wysiwyg, no lists or titles or code-blocks
  • hard to read bug lists/search results
  • upon opening an existing bug, i can, for some reason, edit fields like URL, Keywords, Latest Commit, Depends on, Blocks

None of these are enormous issued individually, but they stack up, so i can understand pretty well why people might bounce off of that. I almost did and i'm a developer. At some point, the hassle of writing a bug report is larger than the hassle of dealing with the issue or... writing a forum post in the hopes it'll be seen by the developers. Developers who, by their choice of system, communicate to users that "this is not a place for normal users"

So yeah, i'm sitting on a few small nitpicks/"issues" which i've just not cared to report because its a hassle and i wouldn't even know which of the categories to choose. And like, maybe Fedoras bugzilla is better organized and these issues are with KDEs Bugzilla specifically, but from looking at it for a bit i don't think so.

Show threadlaund

@lina I also understand theres an argument to be made that the system can't be sobsimple it invites a lot of useless/unactionable/spam reports.

Theres also a culture issue in there somewhere: While this hasn't happened to me personally with the bug projects on account of me having written like, 2 issues total on any Bugzilla, looking for issues i see pretty often that a bug report which is lacking some into just gets closed or seemingly ignored, instead of asking for that info. Don't get me wrong, smaller or newer projects suffer from similar problems (like the absolutely horrid invention called "closed for being stale" or in more recent times LLM-bots trying to "resolve" issues by hallucinating non-existent infos) but overall, i've had far more luck at least knowing where the developers stand with projects using more approachable bugtrackers, like the ones included in git-forges.

Apr 2 at 10:41amWeb
Show threadHoshino Lina (ζ˜ŸδΉƒγƒͺγƒŠ) 🩡 3D Yuri Wedding 2026!!!Apr 2

@laund I get all that, but this is all kind of irrelevant. Those are all general issues that affect the likelihood of user bug reports, that's fair.

The issue is that with *this* particular bug almost nobody bothered to report it, and the few who did, did not usefully follow up, despite it apparently being a fairly widespread problem. That's not normal. It's not explainable by bugzilla friction. The issue seems to be that, somehow, lots of people just assumed it was intentional behavior and not a bug.

Show threadlaundApr 2

@lina

  • the bug teport you linked has been around for a while
  • theres older bug reports which got blanket closed because they happen to be linked to a EOL version of fedora
  • theres no way to upvote/+1 a Bugzilla bug without commenting, which in most places is pretty discouraged as it notifies every participant
  • theres a lot of non-bugreport forum posts about it a simple search engine search can find
  • you have to read pretty deep into the existing bug reports to know whether its actually considered a bug or just something someone reported as a bug that wasn't fixed. Plus, again, no way to know who's a developer or random person, so how do you know the person talking about it being a bug is someone who can make that decision for the project?

sooo yeah, the usability issues of bugzilla are definitely a factor here. if i came across it, saw an open issue, saw i would have to make an account and comment "happened to me just now" and probably get yelled at for useless pings? Yeah, i'd not do anything. Its what i've done for quite a few things. If i came back 2 years and just saw some people talking about trying to find a workaround? At some point its not unreasonable to assume that its intentional or at least something nobody with push perms to fedora/the packages cares about. All the while its entirely possible the people trying to find a fix are in fact maintainers and i just didn't know.

Would this have been avoided by more and better bug reports? Yup, definitely, and it would be really nice if this would happen. Would this have been avoided by clearly communicating, in a way people tend to actually see and understand (read as: without having to scroll, read multiple pages of text, or needing to know the maintainers by username), that its a unintended bug? Also yes. One of these is blaming users behaviour, an issues which is only addressable by communication/"PR", the other is pointing out where that communication fails.

Show threadlaundApr 2
@lina sorry if i'm kinda going off on this here, i know you're not Fedora, but it kinda rubbed me the wrong way that you seemd to basically just be blaming users here without including some kind of consideration for why users might reach that conclusion or what the general issues leading to these kinds of situations are.
Show threadHoshino Lina (ζ˜ŸδΉƒγƒͺγƒŠ) 🩡 3D Yuri Wedding 2026!!!Apr 2

@laund I'm not *blaming* users. I'm describing the reality of the situation that a disproportionate number of people, including those commenting on this thread even, for better or worse, made the incorrect assumption that the behavior is intentional.

That is not normal. That is what makes this bug extremely frustrating. That is why this hasn't been addressed despite widespread impact. I'm not saying it's users' fault. I'm saying it happened.

Would it have been addressed if bugzilla were easier to use? Yeah probably.

But bugs of this impact are almost always fixed despite those flaws in the process. This one is an outlier.

Show threadHoshino Lina (ζ˜ŸδΉƒγƒͺγƒŠ) 🩡 3D Yuri Wedding 2026!!!Apr 2
@laund BTW, maintainers are highlighted in red.
Show threadlaundApr 2
@lina not for me. Do you have to be logged-in to see that? The icon doesn't show either.
Show threadHoshino Lina (ζ˜ŸδΉƒγƒͺγƒŠ) 🩡 3D Yuri Wedding 2026!!!Apr 2
@laund Yes, you have to be logged in.
Show threadlaundApr 2
@lina ...