Crappy Products Cost More!!

[Tom Achtenberg]

I am a registered user of Red hat.  I bought the boxed set for ver 7.2  I downloaded 7.3  I prefer the KDE desktop.  Unfortunately the KDE 3.0 that is included as part of 7.3 is unstable for Konqueror and Kmail, the two main applications I want to use.  KDE released ver 3.1 several weeks ago.  I have twice asked Red Hat tech support when it will be available through the up2date.  I have been completely and totally ignored by Red Hat support.  They have not even acknowledged receiving my question even though it was submitted via a form on the RHN site. In fact the RHN site will not let you log in using Konqueror but does with IE.  If Red Hat hates KDE so much, why do they include it in their distros?  kde.org itself talks about how Red Hat refuses to support their desktop.

If Red Hat is counting on support $'s to stay in business, they have a lot of improving to do.  I won't give them another dime till I see some improvement.

-----Original Message-----
From: alandd@mindspring.com [mailto:alandd@mindspring.com]
Sent: Wednesday, June 26, 2002 8:42 PM
To: plug-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
Subject: Re: Crappy Products Cost More!!


RedHat Professional comes with 90 days technical support.  It also has all the
printed manuals that would cost about $35 separately.

(A small story, indirectly related.)
I have successfully setup a new CVS server at work using RH7.3, Webmin and
CVS, of course.  In explaining what I had done and what I am using to do it,
our company product manager said, and I quote, "If all that software is free,
why are we using it.  It is probably crap."  This was followed by a brief
demonstration of Webmin that left him less "against" the software but still
not "for" it.
(End of story.)

(Another small story)
A friend of mine runs a technology related service business.  He was getting
too much work so he started raising his quotes.  He started getting even more
work from people that had dropped him before because he was "priced too low to
be very good" as they later told him.
(End of small story)

RedHat, I think, is marketing to the people who think they have to pay for
something for it to be any good.  And if they are right, and people want to
pay for the support and the manuals, they remain a viable company.

Some people want to pay lots of money.  Would we geeks pay it?  Nope.  But
some of the suits and non-geeks will.  RedHat will find out soon enough if the
market will pay the price they are asking.

Alan

On Wed, 26 Jun 2002 12:24:13 -0700 "Richard L. Proctor" <krycom1@cox.net>
wrote:

Is it my imagination or does it seem that the worst 
products always costs more.  ie.  If you want Windows XP you plan on 
paying $179. for the home version and more for the professional version.  
Again with RedHat you have a $79.95 personal or workstation edition and comes 

with 3 cd's.  Get the professional version for around $199.00 and i'm not 
sure how many cd's come with it.  Is RedHat trying to compete with 
Microsoft on who can supply the most expensive product?
 
Before anyone goes off saying well you can just 
download the distro and don't have to pay those prices.  I am thinking of 
the newbies.  I would never hand a newbie 3 cd's and say here ya go.  
I would like to have the documentation to go with it.  Of course Redhat and 
Windows both give you wafer thin manuals.  SuSE and Mandrake give you good 
size manuals with plenty of information packed in them.  Also SuSE 
Professional is only $79.95 and comes with 7 cd's and one DVD.  The DVD had 
everything all 7 cd's have and you don't have to do any disk swaps.
 
I have worked with Redhat, Mandrake, and SuSE and 
it seems that Redhat lags far behind the competitors.  Try to install 
Redhat on a seperate hard disk with Windows XP on the first hard disk in NTFS 

format,  Redhat won't even make an entry for Windows XP in lilo.  I 
can imagine the panic attack a newbies face after the redhat install and the 
only option is Redhat.  LOL  That is of course if you can get Redhat 
to install in the first place. It don't like being on a second drive or on a 
partiton with windows that's any larger than 8 gigs.
 
SuSE has always installed on any drive no matter 
what the size or what drive since version 7.1 and earlier maybe.  
This is a serious issue that Redhat needs to address.
 
I dunno,  I just don't see how the cost of 
Redhat boxed distro's is justified.  Maybe i'm missing the point?  Is 
there anyone out there that can show me the point?
 

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