On Sat, 2005-04-30 at 17:16 -0700, Preston Crawford wrote:
On Sat, 2005-04-30 at 13:01 -0700, Marc Chamberlin wrote:
How many times do we need to see this!
-- Ken Schneider
Turns out Ken had something else in mind Multiple copies of the same email. and I misunderstood him. I'm going to respond to this all the same, though, because it's an interesting post.
it. I am sorry you feel it was redundant and had to yet again suffer another person whining, about that apparent lack of support that Novel is going to provide its more advance users and developers. But I am not sorry that I posted it.
This is how I feel as well, with regards to the Firefox issue I'm not sorry I raised the issue of SuSE's stability. If we can't have a community where this is possible, then I think we suffer as a community. I was asking to have help with a problem. In addition I raised a frustration with SuSE's of late. I'm sorry for letting myself get bogged down in a flame war and not being above that. I should have shut up. But I stand by my original contention that just throwing RPMs of new software that haven't been tested into YOU is not the SuSE way. Now that I know where to leave feedback properly I will as well. But I've been a SuSE user for years. And I want to continue to be one. But part of that hinges on the community being friendly and helpful. And I have to tell you from experience that (aside from the FreeBSD IRC channel, which is legendary for its surliness) this mailing list last week was as close to as surly as I've seen any *nix support network.
I too have noticed this of late. Get Chris back to monitor the list. Although it won't happen it was nice when Chris would step in and kill a thread when it got out of hand.
And that's sad to me, because we're seem to be pragmatic users here. We use SuSE because it's not bleeding edge. Because it's stable and gets the job done. And when that starts to slip, I kind of thought we'd all be on the same page on that issue. Otherwise we would be using other distributions with less or no quality control, no?
snip...
SuSE has this, but right now it's quite confusing. There's this list, but the easier to see part is that web-based forum that isn't getting much traffic. And I'm not sure if Novell monitors it.
It's new and may catch on before long. It's hard enough for new people to find how to subscribe to this list let alone find the wiki.
Novel/SuSE may provide other alternative means of giving them feedback, but I assumed this news group is also one of the ways to reach them.
It used to be one of the better ways, actually. Times have changed.
I didn't have the same agenda, but I thought similarly that by raising the issue here it might get some attention. I didn't expect to get ripped a new one and being called a whiner. That was quite a drag. I push SuSE in people in part because of the community. This week was quite sobering. I actually started to reconsider the distro in part because of this. Because when a distro is largely supported by the community and the community isn't friendly, then it's time to consider a new distro, IMHO. Or else pay for support.
This is one of the better lists around, it's just a shame some new people join and don't like or want to abide to this lists way of life.
do so. If I were in their position, I would have a direct feedback link/form right off of their home page in such an obvious way that it shows that THE COMPANY DEEPLY CARES about how their users are experiencing their products. I know a lot of companies fear being
I agree with this. There is a feedback link, but it's kind of buried and the site in general is kind of difficult to navigate. Making this friendlier would go a long way towards this goal. ^^^
One thing I want to caution everyone against, is do not discourage people from complaining on a newsgroup, such as this one, about things that are troubling them about the SuSE products. Even if the complaint is redundant and has been raised before, the more people complain the higher it raises the priority to get that issued fixed and/or addressed. If someone comes on strong, after becoming very frustrated over something, try to look beyond the emotion and examine the root cause. Look for solutions together, and refrain from badgering them.
That used to not be the case here. It's changed recently, and I don't know why. It's sad. Because it was part of SuSE's charm. That the community wasn't ideological. Wasn't angry. Wasn't "holier than thou". The community was all about helping people get stuff done, because the OS was all about getting stuff done, without hassle.
There are a lot of good/knowledgeable people on this list with a vast realm of knowledge. I replied on time a few months back that when I would search the archives for an answer I would include Anders Johansson in the search criteria as I was sure to find the answer that way. Still holds true today. -- Ken Schneider UNIX since 1989, linux since 1994, SuSE since 1998 "The day Microsoft makes something that doesn't suck is probably the day they start making vacuum cleaners." -Ernst Jan Plugge