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Comment by ronsor | Hacker News Reader

Community forums/support from big companies like Microsoft and Adobe tend to be completely useless. In most cases, all threads follow the same flow:

* Question with reasonable amount of detail.

* A reply from some "Community Helper" (Rank: Gold): "did you try reading the help files?"

* Another person with a "Staff" badge: "this isn't our department"

[Thread closed.]

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* Helper: This is a great suggestion which I'll flag for the team to add support (5 years ago)

For what it’s worth the people who made that sort of post are probably vaguely annoyed at the lack of progress on this change, or on other ones on their own particular list of requests that have been moldering for half a decade while everyone spends three dev cycles adding half-assed AI bullshit features.

At least it's not Qualcomm support forums.

"Talk to the sales about this functionality. [Thread closed]"

I have some respect for the Oracle's honesty in putting stuff like "this bug can't be solved in the cheapest version of the software, buy the upgrade package X if you need it fixed" right on the forum.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this. Every enterprise OSS company operates like that. People paying for support and funding the project get to make requests. Anyone else can submit a PR or be happy with the free software. It’s a pretty good deal if you ask me.

Granted, Oracle charges a lot just to even use the software, but I still don’t think it’s unreasonable to limit certain types of requests for higher paying customers. Pay base price and you get to use the software, get updates and call tech support. Pay a premium and they prioritize bug fixes and features for you.

The "no guarantee of fitness for a purpose" people put on the terms of software they sell is bullshit. There is something wrong with selling software with some functionality and then requiring customers to buy other pieces of software to make that functionality work.

That said, yes, they still handle that bit better than most large companies.

You could ask the company to remove that clause for you, but it may come with two or three extra zeroes at the end of the price tag because of the legal and support ramifications that come with it.

You could make such a clause illegal, but then all software would have to come with those two or three extra zeroes.

Hah, this gave me a good laugh. There have been countless times where I have ran into this exact kind of situation, and it's not just limited to Microsoft and Adobe.

This is true, I chose to pick on MS and Adobe because the article closes with the admission that the author has backup Windows machines to run Adobe Creative Cloud in the 'inevitable' event that Linux has a problem.

For myself, those issues have been largely evitable; I think my longest current uptime on a running linux install is approaching 5 years..

Many OpenSource forums and software are like this. None of the help is there to help you use the system. It’s there for you to gain some deep knowledge that you don’t care about.

But I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. some Linux distro needs to adopt some hardware line and partner with them to release a known good line of computers and polish the hell out of it. Like System 76 but nicer.

Almost all community help forums (for commercial and open source software) suffer from what I like to call "HaveYouTrieditis". You post a question, and without any root cause analysis or even a description of why it might work, people start posting "Have you tried X?" and "Have you tried Y?" and "You should try Z." These kinds of responses are almost always unhelpful.

I'm asking for help because I don't want to just try random things.

Or "Did you try rebooting?"

The Microsoft Way (tm)

"Hello, thank you for posting. I understand you are having a problem with X. I assure you that you have my deepest sympathy in this time of trouble, and I will stop at nothing until this problem is fixed.

Have you tried running sfc /scannow?

...

Restart in Safe Mode?

...

Backup and Reinstall Windows. You can use OneDrive to backup if you have not already purchased a subscription."

Nailed it.

Lmao true.

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