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Drivers & Software

Kirsebaer
Adept II

The bug reporting tool is so frustrating to use

1) Could you please increase the small windows where the user writes how to reproduce an error? The four lines tall windows is way too small, and it becomes infuriating to work with.

2) It's mandatory to select the affected program or game that is reported, but the list doesn't include the Radeon Software itself. It's not possible to make a bug report on the bug reporting tool or Radeon Software. I have manually written Radeon Software in the "affected AMD game/ program" drop down menu, but I wonder if this causes the bug report to not comply with the system and not get added.

3) Reporting bugs using the Radeon bug reporting tool has been a very frustrating experience, because of the closed system being used.

I've reported several bugs over many months, but none of them appear in the known issues list. The videos I've recorded, uploaded and attached to the bug reports show zero views, and I get the impression that no one has been assigned to the bug reports, and that they were just closed.

Then a new driver comes out, and I check if a particular bugs is still present. It still is, now going back to October 2020 I believe. The issue is that my monitor won't turn on after entering sleep/standby by moving the mouse or pressing a key on the keyboard. I have to manually turn the monitor off an on, for it to receive a signal again from the graphics card. Some days I have to switch my monitor off and on several times, and it's quite frustrating not to see such a bug acknowledged or fixed.

So I repeat everything again, create a new bug report, re-add the video, write that they are free to contact me if they want my help testing something, and then I wait.

At some point a new driver comes out. I look through the change log and see nothing. Then I test if the issue has been fixed, which isn't the case, and I repeat everything again, growing increasingly frustrated by the experience.

The first issue, is that there is no way of knowing whether the bug report was actually received. The user just has to trust the system. With Bugzilla or Github, you can see the report immediately, and also quickly edit away any mistakes or append missing attachments. Neither of things are naturally possible with a closed system afterwards.

But then what happens? Does it just float around without anyone getting assigned to it since nothing happens for so long? After all this does sometimes happen, but on an open bug reporting platform the user can see that.

Or was it discarded because I manually wrote "Radeon Software" instead of selecting e.g. quake.exe in the mandatory drop down list, where Radeon Software isn't listed?

Or did the engineer that read it come to the conclusion that the bug report lacks information and just close it? Or is the bug report open, but with the lowest priority level since nothing happens, and it doesn't show up in the known errors list?

There is no way of knowing whether any progress occurs or not, since no feedback mechanism is implemented, and the user can't look for themselves. It's like awaiting a package without a track or trace number, and after a few weeks you begin to wonder if it'll ever show up. Or imagine encoding a video and not knowing if your system was fully loaded for 10 minutes or 100 hours, because the programmer has omitted a loading bar.

I wonder and worry how it's possible for a small foundation like Mozilla that rely heavily on volunteers, to have a quite frankly much superior bug reporting platform to AMD. Financially AMD is giant compared to Mozilla, AMD has investors to please, and are selling products unlike Mozilla. Products that the users recommend to friends and family if they have a good user experience, and fixing software bugs is a major source of this. If anything, I would expect it to be the other way around.

I also imagine that it can't be in AMD's interest, that it takes so much longer to fix bugs with an inefficient closed system. Nor to have a system where for instance 200 users flood the system with the same issue, because they didn't know that someone else had already reported it. So for AMD's and the user's sake, I hope you will switch to an open bug reporting platform.

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