Hello Ritesh, > Debian as a project is different than others. Most other similar projects, > have > a commercial backing and interest. This puts the onus on them (other Linux > distributions) to ensure their support infrastructure is simple, intuitive and > supportable.
You raise some interesting points especially regarding fragmentation of support. To be fair to Debian, even projects with "commercial backing" have this issue. :) I think we should judge ourselves on our results and not whether X or Y exists. In other words, it doesn't matter whether the support is operated by paid operatives or by the community, the key question is whether our users are acutally getting the support they need. However, it is very difficult to get concrete answers here. Anecdotes are not data, but if we hear enough times that "Yeah, I tried using Debian but my wifi/video/keyboard/smartcard didn't work, but it worked under Z…" then we might start to question whether we are serving our users best. Somewhat related; as I outlined in my platform, I intend to perform some usability testing to identify our biggest bottlenecks in known problem areas. In general, I think we are doing *pretty* well and specific targeting of managable support concerns (eg. security support for oldstable ie. Debian LTS) have been shown to be effective. However, we will always be limited by the number of hours we can dedicate to Debian on a volunteer basis. Correct or not, providing support also has a reputation for not being very rewarding, so incentivising developers to spend will regrettably remain an uphill battle. Regards, -- ,''`. : :' : Chris Lamb `. `'` la...@debian.org / chris-lamb.co.uk `-