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Dell Opens Up About Desktop Linux
An anonymous reader writes "Michael Dell explains his company's Linux desktop strategy in an interview at DesktopLinux.com. He says that it's not practical for Dell (the company) to support numerous distributions due to their incompatibilities, but that he doesn't want alienate large segements of the Linux community by selecting a favorite Linux distro to standardize on (Ubuntu appears to be his favorite, at the moment, by the way.) What he'd really like to see, is for the popular Linux distros to converge on a common core platform, according to the article."
It's really sad, too, that those who can fix problems never call in, because they'd be calling in *fixes* not problems.
That doesn't work if the procedures aren't there for the helpdesk in the first place.
eg. Two weeks ago I found a problem which eventually I solved myself. Now, I could ring my ISP and say "Don't know if you're aware of this, but a computer with a fluxquox network card nailed to 10Mbps will, if connected to the internet directly through the cable modem you supply, be damn slow for no apparent reason - even though the Internet connection is significantly slower than 10Mbps so you wouldn't expect it to matter".
They would say "You're having problems connecting to the Internet? Can you reset your PC for me please?"
I'd spend 10 minutes trying to explain to the person on the end of the phone that I'd had problems, I'd figured out what they were and how to solve them, and that this information could be useful to them. Eventually they'd just agree to get me off the phone, but there's no knowledgebase for them to update because all they do is follow the script.