[svlug] My next computer and its support

[Luke S. Crawford]

On 11/21/2016 07:47 AM, norm at dad.org wrote:
> I am a very old man, 84 years old.
>
> I have been using RedHat systems and paying for RedHat support for nearly 20
> years now. I am currently using Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation release
> 6.8, on a very high-end workstation. I use if for program development (mostly
> Java but some C and a little Perl, Bash, Python etc), for entertaintmenrt,
> and for managing my life.
>
> For me, Redhat problems are that:
>
>         I haven't been able to get the latest versions of Chrome and Chromium
>         to work under it.
>
>         The paid support varies from really terrible, to mediocre, and very
>         occasionally good.

So, I'm  only talking about support.  RedHat support, in my time as a 
sysadmin, has been better than support from anyone else, even 
high-dollar support from IBM and EMC and stuff.

Now, your quality of support primarily depends on how easy what you want 
is.  If your power supply is dead, hell, even Dell can do a bang-up job 
of figuring that out and getting you a new power supply.  If there's a 
drive out on your SAN?  well, if your SAN vendor doesn't get you a new 
drive the day after it happens (regardless of if you complain)  they are 
incompetent.   Some things are easy to support, and almost everyone can 
support those things well.

If you are trying to do something slightly non-standard with your X 
windows system?   God help you.   In my experience, RHEL support is 
better than support from anyone else, but when you are doing something 
weird, it can still seem pretty bad.

I guess I don't really have advice for the  rest.  I also oppose systemd 
on the "but I already have decades of experience with sysvinit" 
argument, but I think that ship has sailed;  If I want people to 
continue to throw money at me, I've gotta learn it.


If you want the redhat people to be in a area they are better at 
supporting, buy a mac, then ssh into a server running RHEL to do your 
linux work.   Speaking from experience, supporting a GUI linux box is 
about a thousand times more difficult than supporting a headless server.