Sometimes the reproduction instructions look as if they can be followed on another platform. I've done that. "Let me just try that quickly on my…" and bingo. But speaking generally, if a bug is that easy to reproduce on your usual development platform, you find it before shipping anyway.

Trying to reproduce a bug by doing something different than what the customer did is a good way to waste time, in my experience.

Perhaps I should elaborate.

One of my first really nasty bugs of this kind was platform-independent, in the sense that the fix affected all platforms. Once I had found the buggy code it was easy to reproduce it on my development workstation by constructing a more efficient reproducer.

But it did not affect all platforms equally. With the hardware on my desk it led to a slow memory leak and would crash after a month or more, on a particular customer's hardware it leaked all memory in an hour, and the customer had more memory than I. I don't remember why, maybe the different CPUs changed whether a race was lost/won? Anyway, I could have gone a year without noticing the bug in my office, but even on the same platform as I personally used, customers would have infrequent crashes.

So. Platform-dependent or not? It's hard to classify in those terms, don't you agree? And that's typical in my experience.

Yeah that makes sense, the same root cause can show different symptoms. Thing is, the triaging starts with the symptoms, and you might not know whether or not the root cause is platform-specific until you've spent a lot of time digging into it. So as far as the dev is concerned, maybe it's not an important bug if nobody on their big target platform is noticing it.

Depends on the type of software. I feel like PC games are on the extreme end of having lots of minor bugs and one very dominant platform.

In my experience it's mixed. Some bugs affect few people on the big platform, but the sheer size of the platform means that the absolute number of people affected is large, and the bad word of mouth then comes from the big platform. Others don't. Sigh. It's mixed.