Recently I’ve come across some bugs in the Gramps bug tracker which I can reproduce (or not) on Windows, and it would help to know if the bugs are reproducible on Linux and/or MacOS. I usually put a note and sometimes other volunteers see it and respond, and other times they go unanswered.
is there an existing way to tag bugs that need testing on certain platforms? If not, could we use similar tags in Mantis as labels in GitHub to make it easy to identify such issues?
Does the gramps developer community come together on an instant message platform to discuss development?
Microsoft has a compatibility layer for Linux now. I haven’t looked at it since I don’t use Windows on my computer, but there is more information at the link above.
There is also a free virtual machine from Oracle, called VirtualBox. You would still have your current Windows installation, but then when you want to try out an error on the Linux version of Gramps, you would open your VirtualBox app and pick which operating system you want to run inside VirtualBox.
I have Thunderbird configured to log me on to #gramps on freenode.net but it’s rare to see a conversation. Should I be logging on to some other IRC server?
@S.Mackay Love WSL! Made a pretty strong effort to set up Ubuntu WSL with VSCode on Windows with Remote Development environment, but the dependencies never really sorted themselves out as far as I can remember. When I get a more capable machine with Windows 11 will be my next attempt to try it out.
With a build-your-own OS like many linux distributions, the main barriers are setting up the firmware/drivers and, as you ran into, dependencies for the apps you want. Different apps will sometimes require not only the correct dependency, but also the right version number. If the dependency you are using is too old, or too new, for what your app was written for, then obviously there will be problems. This is especially a problem if one picks a “stable” version of a distro that has a long release cycle or even an older version of a long term support distro (I noticed Ubuntu 18.04 is still available on WSL!) because for stability most of the dependency packages will only get security updates and bug fixes. So if someone tries to install a newer app from outside the official repository in 18.04, it probably won’t work right. Then I have noticed Ubuntu in the past sometimes updated some popular apps (like Firefox) to newer versions for the LTS releases (because that is what the users want) but not the dependencies, or vice versa.
Some distributions, like Linux Mint, try to make setup as easy as possible for all users, but then they get complaints of being bloated. Ubuntu at one time was great for beginners, and I learned Linux on Ubuntu after failing with Simply Mepis, but I avoid Ubuntu now for my own use due to some linux-world drama regarding Snap packaging, lol.
Fortunately there are quite a lot of Linux users in the Gramps community who might answer questions, when you try WSL again.