Dan
In my opinion you have made your arguments well and almost everyone
can agree with you on at least some, if not all, of your points.
Having worked in R&D for almost 30 years I can understand the technician's quest for
perfection.
But the sad truth is, it is not obtainable, or at least not at a price that the
consumer will pay.
So a compromise is necessary between the need to obtain a return on expenditures and
the quality of the shipped product. As long as the customer knows what trade-offs
were made
(newer kernels, emphasis on newer hardware etc) and if serious problems are
acknowledged
and then rectified by the product manufacturer rather quickly, then in my opinion it
is difficult,
perhaps even unfair, to complain very much.
The one-size-fits-all marketing approach does irritate a little. But since
Mandrakesoft has grown so
very quickly, it would appear that many customers do indeed know what to expect from
their
products, products that they may also obtain legally free of charge or obligation.
I have personally experienced problems similar to yours with RedHat 6.0 & 6.1
Caldera 3.2 and TurboLinux 4.0, in addition to Mandrake 7.0. And although I bought my
copy
of Mandrake 7.0-2 and registered the product, Mandrake Support still have not replied
to
me either. Linux problems can be extremely frustrating, even pencil-snappers, but
their solutions
produce pleasure. Which makes the Mandrake Linux experience clearly worthwhile, at
least for me.
Regards,
Ron
Dan Swartzendruber <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> said:
>
> I just want to reemphasize that I wasn't intending to flame anyone. But my
> point remains. When linux was a totally ad-hoc thing, there was an excuse
> for this kind of thing. Now, with companies like mandrake building and
> shipping distros, I sometimes wonder if there is even a pretense at quality
> control. I don't think mandrake is any worse than redhat, caldera or
> whoever, and I don't expect bottomless, free maintenance, but I do expect
> something close to stable. I haven't tried 7.02, but from what I heard,
> the initial 7.0 was absolutely terrible, in terms of quality. I know there
> are limited man-hours to do a new release, but if I had a choice, I'd opt
> for some larger chunk to be spent on QA as opposed to neat new features. I
> haven't played with other distros before, so I have no idea how they stack
> up against mandrake on this issue.
>
>
>
________________________________________________________________
Ilmainen Internet osoitteesta http://www.sirkus.com/
