hello Chris, Thank you for your response. Please see below some follow-ups. On Thu, 2017-03-30 at 15:56 +0100, Chris Lamb wrote: > 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. I admin "Support" is a much wider topic. So I'll take examples to phrase my questions. Most major hardware and software vendors have a handful of Linux distributions marked as supported, even though there's a high possibility that other distributions would work equally well. I understand marking an item "Supported" has other challenges, which is what leaves out most of the non-commercial distributions. I myself, with one of my previous employer, had challenges mentioning support. Back then, we rather chose to cook up a "Community Support Model" for Debian and similar non-commercial* GNU/Linux distributions. ISVs have improved over time. Today, 2 of the tools that I use (Crossover and Skype), do offer a Debian .deb package. On the IHV front, I am not sure if things are the same: * We have a very small list of IHVs [1] mentioning support for Debian. * We have a Debian Enterprise Mailing List [2]. But I don't see much traffic there Do you think a HW Certification Process should be available for Debian ? I see all other Enterprise Distributions (including Debian Derivatives) have a certification process in place. Should we have a Certification Test Suite (Both Hardware and Software) that our vendors could run and provide us with the results ? Such results could be validated by our Enterprise Team, and accordingly a HCL could be set up for Debian. [1] https://wiki.debian.org/Hardware/ShippingWithDebian [2] https://lists.debian.org/debian-enterprise/ * Non Commercial as in not backed by a profit making organization -- Ritesh Raj Sarraf | http://people.debian.org/~rrs Debian - The Universal Operating System
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