Thorsten,
I'm rolling over laughing imagining you trying to "herd cats" (smiley laughing so hard, tears are coming out of his eyes!)
All of your points are well taken. In any event, at the very least, I would like to try to produce bug reports that go - perhaps - just a tad beyond the "Doh! It don't work!" stage. (grinning) This is not to say that all, or even the majority of your bug reports are pieces of GAGH, but. . . . I have seen bugs on Ubuntu's bug list that should be bronzed. And if there were a "Bug Report Hall of Shame. . . ." 'Nuff said!
Obviously, as you mention, I cannot compete with VA class users who have their simms on for days at a time, but I would like to create bug reports that are reasonably well characterized. It has been my observation - even in commercial software testing - that the better characterized a bug is, the more clearly the report is written, and the easier the QA analyst makes it for the relevant dev to reproduce it, the more likely it is that YOUR bug will get seen and fixed. If a QA analyst does this repeatedly, he gets a "rep", and his name on a bug report gets attention. Conversely, ill written bugs, lousy characterization, and impossible reproducibility will also get you a "rep" - that you don't want!
The same topic - sideways, sort-of. . . .
I am putting together a test platform for FG, both Linux and Windows. My main Windows test platform will be Win7 64 bit. For Linux, I am planning on a 64 bit Mint install, and am also considering a different distribution in a different partition on the same HD. What would you recommend as a second Linux test distribution? Fedora? SUSE? CentOS? Raspbian? ( )
I am assuming here that the typical user installs (on Linux) for FG mirror the popularity of the distro, though I welcome any input you - or anyone else - can provide here. What I do NOT want to do is to have to re-re-re-recreate installs because I got the initial set wrong. I'd like to hit the popular distro's right off the bat.
Thanks for all your very useful commentary and advice.
(I'm still howling over those damn cats. . . )
Jim (JR)
Update:
A quick look over at Distrowatch shows that Might Mint is King of the Heap!
(Yes, I am an unabashed Mint fan-boy. Viz., an article of mine over at QA TechTips about Mint: http://www.qatechtips.com/2013/03/all-h ... linux.html)
The list of the top ten looks something like this:
1 Mint
2 Debian
3 Ubuntu
4 openSUSE
5 Manjaro
6 elementary
7 Fedora
8 Zorin
9 CentOS
10 deepin
So, maybe the question I should be asking is "which distribution classes should I be using?" Obviously Mint/Ubuntu/Debian are all part of one class, Fedora and (I think) CentOS are Red Hat re-spins, etc. I'm not to sure about openSUSE - the last time I tried it, it wobbled sideways and fell off the hard drive. . . .
I'm considering a Mint/Fedora install, though I'd appreciate any advice and/or suggestions you folks may wish to offer.
Jim (JR)