[R. Stia]
SuSE is supposed to be "user friendly". [...] Here is why SuSE support is not up to it:
Hi, people. It is all a question of perception and experience, of course. In my own case, I've been around for a good while, tried a few other distributions in the past, and have been sticking with SuSE for a few years now, as I find they do rather well! :-)
Alas, Yast 1, the best install tool they ever had is no longer available.
Yast2 is not _that_ different, you know. It is true that particular attention was paid so installation gets easier for those having little knowledge or experience with Linux. On the other hand, I've been pleasantly surprised to discover that Yast2 has these fine knobs I needed to repair my own (non-Yast related) mistakes. The look is undoubtedly different, but the underlying principles are similar.
I did a new install of 8.0 about a month ago. I still cannot make my PCI modem work. This is the same modem that worked flawlessly with 7.0 & 7.2. RH6.0 before that. I configured the modem with Yast 1 at that time.
I too have my own little problems with Yast2, but nevertheless, I see that Yast2 addresses some matters better than Yast1 did. Having to work on many machines at various levels, I even missed Yast2 in some circumstances. Yast2 has shortcomings indeed, some are already corrected through patches, the others will probably disappear as things evolve. For some machines, installing 8.0 was boringly easy. :-). For others, I have to work a bit more. In one case, much more. When difficulties pop up, I quite understand how frustrating it might be for those, myself included, who feel overwhelmed by all this. We have to be honest here: deep down, this is complex.
SuSE doesn't say support is for the installation. They say that support is for the installation of a basic operating system. To me that means at least the printer and modem should work. Otherwise what use is it?
I was surprised to hear that SuSE was offering such support. This is something quite difficult for a company to afford. Give SuSE a few releases to iron out the main problems and find an equilibrium with their new support strategy. I would guess, without knowing, that they got overwhelmed by it. On this list, many months ago, I've read the anger of someone having found a bug in some random package. "I paid for the distro, it should have no bugs." For one, I would never, never ever expect SuSE to feel fully responsible for each and every of the thousands of packages they distribute. On the average, I feel that they are serious in testing everything a bit, and am glad that trend towards stability more than towards highest possible version numbers. Of course, they bear a special responsibility for the overall organisation of the distribution and its installer. I've confidence they do well in the long run, and feel forgiving for the few bumps that might be met on the road. Even if sometimes, those bumps hurt myself.
Now, tell me there isn't something wrong when a piece of hardware that worked previously on two of their older OS's, and will not now work on a later version, and they cannot be bothered to tell me why.
Hardware may fail, software as well. No software packager should be overly confident about software, and blindly blame hardware, this is rude. On the other hand (this happens to me for one machine with 8.0), hardware may fade out of fashion. It may not be supported forever, so when it stops being supported, I have to decide if I buy more recent hardware, or fight myself with obsolescent software versions, to recover that support. I'm not getting mad at anybody when this happens, however. All in all, good and bad, 8.0 is appealing. Retrofitting all recent software versions I want in 7.2 or 7.3 would probably require me a much greater effort. For me, 8.0 is still on the economical route, energy-wise.
I suppose now I will be "blacklisted" and receive no more help.
For one, and am not sure what others do, I do not blacklist people often. Surely not for having opinions: otherwise I would soon blacklist myself :-). Besides spammers, of course, I see that I only blacklist people who used abusive language, or showed continuing bad attitudes (like repeating their stanza like a parrot -- unable to listen to others; or purposedly writing unacceptably spelled English -- unable to sort out IRC from email). Happily enough, most people are reasonable and speakable. This mailing list is meant so we can all help each other. So, despite with might have our problems, we are in the same boat after all, let's try to stay friends. -- François Pinard http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard