[Ilugc] Re: ILUC Meet on Saturday
- From: knura@xxxxxxxxx (Arun Khan)
- Date: Tue Dec 16 00:35:39 2008
On Monday 15 Dec 2008, ?. ???? ???????|Sri Ramadoss M wrote:
On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 5:48 PM, Arun Khan <knura@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Being a member of several LUG lists, I will say that the quality of
help from FOSS/Linux mailings lists/forums is equal or better than
the paid support especially when users have done some home work and
then sought help.
Well.. I just say at this point of time, in my experience,
proprietary people understand a "User" better than FOSS people...
Well, the proprietary people build support cost in their products
(assuming you have licensed copies) otherwise expect *no* support e.g.
unlicensed XP do not get any security updates from MS. Compare this to
Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Ubuntu ... there is *no* charge for updates.
Heck, for paying clients I also hold their hands to the extent of
placing in house tech. support in their offices/factories. Whereas,
when people send me private emails seeking help I simply tell them to
post their queries at the LUG mailing list or pay consulting fee if
they want personalized hand holding.
The proprietary people work on the same principle - no money no support.
From software useability point of view, we have had minimal issues
migrating people from MS Office to OpenOffice once we have trained them
on how to use the equivalent features in OOo (see above comment). I am
not a graphics designer but I suspect for someone who is familiar with
Photoshop it should not be too much retraining to use GIMP, likewise
for other domain applications ...
On another angle, take Vista which requires you to invest in a whole lot
of other software that are no longer compatible with it e.g. I can no
longer use my lic. copy of WordPerfect Suite 2000.
That dragged me to that previous statement..
What "Users" (again not Students & Computer Science Professionals)
want is Software that works on installation, do things that they
expect and not pointers how to make it work..
If you are referring to clicking on setup.exe and answering a few
questions to get the software going then I agree that it is a mind set
change that is required to do it the "Linux" way (package manager) but
this is also the bane wherein a lot of the problems creep in through
end user tinkering with their systems w/o fully understanding what the
heck they are doing. I had one end user tell me their 5 Win XP Home
stations were networked with out any TCP/IP settings! Upon closer
inspection I showed them that all their systems were getting IPs from
the broadband router's dhcp service.
--
Arun Khan
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