On Sat, 2005-04-30 at 13:01 -0700, Marc Chamberlin wrote:
How many times do we need to see this!
-- Ken Schneider
I was wondering the same thing. Wasn't I just villified for positing the same question, essentially? Not that I disagree, but...
Preston
Ken, Preston, all -
Turns out Ken had something else in mind 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. 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?
company that does not provide them for its users. And I will not repeat buy a product that does not provide such a feature. I don't expect support to be free, but I DO expect the ability to provide feedback to be. Every product I have developed has that built in as part of its help system and my own product web pages go out of their way to provide feedback forms, wiki wiki sites etc.
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.
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.
Since it is being hosted on their domain I presume they have people monitoring this group. Hence I threw this particular rock, in the hopes that either by joining a clamor of voices complaining about their marketing strategy/policy, on SuSE Pro, or by starting such a ruckus, we might eventually get them to reconsider and address this issue.
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.
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.
I really hope Novel is monitoring this group for their own sake, having feedback is so darn vital and valuable it is not funny. They would be wise to even have someone officially represent them, monitoring and responding from time to time, on this news group...
That used to happen. I haven't seen anyone from SuSE pop on this time, though. The closest we got is James, who is a tremendous contributor to the SuSE community (at least as far as I know he doesn't work for SuSE, although they should hire him) and thus garners the respect of others here for his work providing support. We're lucky to have him. But yeah, having someone from SuSE/Novell monitor the list officially would be nice. Preston