On Tue, Sep 25, 2007 at 11:55:26AM -0500, Mike McCarty wrote: > I have some feedback about my GF who uses Debian at my suggestion. > I have no irons in the fire on this one, as I don't use Debian, > though I do administer her machine for her. So, please don't take > this as a complaint from me, as it isn't. I'm simply informing > the Debian forum of a situation. > > She's had four problems with using Debian on her machine, > and support response from this forum has been somewhat less > than she had hoped for.
There are different levels of support for what ever you use. Microsoft and its partners get the specs they need and produce reasonable support for hardware and since they are not open source, they can not be improved by others. So driver support can vary greatly. Software is in a similar situation as is the Operating system. And commercial support cost real money. IIRC MS had something like 150 USD for one support call and there is no gauruntee of the outcome. But if the issue is hardware support, then driver support is going to be, on average, useable out-of-the-box. And similarly if you have software needs that align with already existing products, then that too will work out-of-the-box. Now distros are of varying quality and have varying support. Debian is known to have mostly volunteer support with commercial support mostly for server use which would probably have costs on par with windows server support. If you used Ubuntu, you'd have out-of-the-box a commercial support option targeted for home/soho users which IIRC costs 150 USD/ year, which seems quite reasonable. Now with Free software, at present, there are many problems that simply have no solution regardless of which one you choose and so the only 'support' option is to pay a large sum of money or wait until that magic day. I recently heard that 'evince' now support the ability to fill-in pdf forms. I have wanted this for some years and only using Adobe´s regular product to do this with the help of WINE, now, as of this month, this feture is part of a free software tool. One of the issue with MS and Apple is they have limited support for hardware and software. So if you have something less that 4 years old. you should be ok. But the farther out you go, there is an increasing change that floss support will be on-par or better. So if your SO buys/has recent HW and has software needs in-line with current products, then XP may be the way to go. The benefits of FLOSS are know to you and you may have explained them to your SO but if she can't get her work done, that is the ultimate arbitrator. <snip> > I used the "official" reporting tool on one of the problems, > and we were not even accorded the courtesy of a response > indicating that the report had been received and was going > to be acted upon. The tool did confirm that a report had > been made, but that was all. I've seen no indication from > Debian that any progress has been made. One of the issue discussed on -devel was something similar. Some feel that every bug report should have a human responding saying 'thanks for your bug report´, other wanted an automated response. It was noted that not all bug reports are equal, so it was mentioned that if a DD wanted better info, they should send out a message asking for it and make 'contact' with the bug reporter because users dont feel appreciated when they are not contacted and thanked and made to feel an equal part of Debian. So a thanked user is more apt to give more bug reports and more likely to give better reports if asked by a nice dd. But since its not 'policy', its not something that is required. There is the obvious situation where DD have real lives and can not respond to every user, But some said that they should respond within say 1 or 2 week if possible, if not able to sooner. Someone suggest that there to a team of people whose job is to monitor new bugs and acknowledge users contributions and triage bugs with the users help. So in the area of user-bts-DD interaction, there is room more improvement. Perhaphs the paid support of Canonical would fill this gap, thus the Ubuntu recommendation. One final note, at least she is aware of the existance of FLOSS and that it was able to fulfill most of her needs and when those issues that she had are resolved, she might be game to take the plunge. It also means that she is one more person who can be witness to the fact that FLOSS is not what the general population thinks it is, useless and not ready for general use. cheers, Kev -- | .''`. == Debian GNU/Linux == | my web site: | | : :' : The Universal |mysite.verizon.net/kevin.mark/| | `. `' Operating System | go to counter.li.org and | | `- http://www.debian.org/ | be counted! #238656 | | my keyserver: subkeys.pgp.net | my NPO: cfsg.org | |join the new debian-community.org to help Debian! | |_______ Unless I ask to be CCd, assume I am subscribed _______|
