Recent Linux Client Issues and Community Response

Recently we in the linux community have had some ongoing trouble with the native client. I'm certain that LL has been made aware of this problem and are doing what they can to fix it. They have indicated many times over and again that they will continue to support the linux client and that it has been integrated into the codebase. I understand the general frustration that has gripped the community as, for the most part, if something is broken we want to fix it and in this case we cannot do this. While at times we continue with very little information from LL hoping that they won't drop the linux client at every major version release the linux client has been available. If you were to read the linux forums you might get the opposite impression, that LL doesn't "care" about linux users -- that the client suddenly isn't going to be available on the next major release. I'm certain that this isn't the case. While we can do very little without the source, I'm sure LL appreciates our detailed bug reports and reproduction scenarios. The problem now is to stop flooding and bashing them -- let them come up with a solution.

I'm not sure that is the case at all.

There is one very vociferous troll posting in order to bait others. (Mentioning no names )

Yep, agreed. I think what would be nice would be if there would be more blog posts on their blogs. If really more Linden Labs employees would reflect what they do it would give us a better oberall impression what to expect not only from the Linux point of view.

I think there must be many things going on behind the scene, but if you look at:
http://secondlife.com/community/blogs.php

You rarely see a new post. So from my view we do not need to be official informed - but LL should generally consider to encourage LL stuff to blog more often - ans also more of them, so that every aspect of SL gets more transparent. This is actually a better way to communicate than with Townhall Meetings. Phil can also answer a lot of questions their, but he can not answer questions nobody will ever ask.


Vinci

Granted...

I agree with you in the hope that LL would become more transparent, especially in the hope that they would blog a bit more about development.

It seems (from the outside) that Linden Labs has noone working on the Linux port.

I can repeat it again and again: not one real improvement (keyboard hotkey handling, sound, etc) can be seen in the Linux version since it's been out since February. That's 4 months!

It doesn't give us much hope.

Please let's wait until the next meeting has taken place. Karen might have some answers for us to clear up the situation.

Not entirely correct: ASDW keyboard movement now works! So someone must be doing something for the Linux client at LL, unless it just fixed itself!

But I take your point. I look forward to hear what Karen Linden has to say about the matter.

regarding improvements (hot key handling, sound, et.al.)

I think that LL is probably doing exactly what they should: Focussing on getting the client and code they've already got working solidly without crashing before trying to introduce a bunch of new code that could (potentially) cause more problems. I just hope they get the bug with the remove_marker_file() crash fixed. It's beyond annoying now and far into the territory of ludicrous.


Tal

This isn't a bug, it is part of the shutdown sequence when the client traps a fatal signal and shuts down. The bug is much earlier.

Ah, well that makes more sense then. Guess you can tell I'm not a programmer. But, I think the spirit of my previous post still stands, as it were

And thank you for the correction/clarification

Tal

Such is life with all MMO's that are under constant development, its a balancing act.

My biggest problem with LL is that no one knows anything. They don't pass on information. If they said, "Hey, we've got issues with the linux client, you are going to have to wait a week for it to be fixed", I'd be ok with that. The problem is that no one knows how long problems will last, or even that anyone is working on fixing them. I posted before that I was going to cancel my account, and I did. I understand if it is broken, just reassure us that it won't be broken forever.

We will try to address this problem an d many others on today's (Wednesday) LUG meet with Karen Linden.

Lindens have a bad reputation of promising things, then not keeping the promises

Eg. Havok 2 (was due 2004-2005), Mono (was due 2005 summer-fall), HTML on a prim (was due mid - late 2005).

So even if they say something, that doesn't mean much.