RH recommends using Windows? plus a Question!

[Warren Togami]

On Tue, 2003-11-04 at 14:05, Jef Spaleta wrote:
> Hmm..is it wise to make it point and click easy to list brokenness in a
> hardware database that is completely seperate from bugzilla? I'd really
> hate to lose useful bugreports to comments in the hardware database and
> make developers have to troll the hardware reviews as well to find out
> if a piece of hardware has a problem. A review based hardware database 
> makes some sense as an end-user tool for people choosing hardware to
> use, but i don't know if it makes sense as a tool for developers to keep
> track of specific hardware issues...and i'd hate to see review comments
> become the prefered end-user way to report problems...but have bugzilla
> be the preferred developer way to track problems.  

When Michael, the kernel guy, proposes a GUI solution, it must be for
good reason. =)

End-users NEED a simple way to submit hardware information where they
don't need to learn about tools like lspci, dmesg, dmidecode, etc.  It 
saves us time by having a large pool of submitted data, allowing us to
see trends and avoid asking for information.  Furthermore, fewer poorly
written Bugzilla entries from end-users would waste our time.

As long as the topic contains "Windows" this seems like a good time to
mention what I saw in recent Windows betas that I thought was a really
good idea.  When Windows was unable to find a built-in driver for an
unknown piece of hardware, it searched a database on the Internet. 
While this mechanism was useless in the AMD64 Windows beta that I tried
since ZERO DRIVERS were available, I really see the potential for us to
harness this same idea.

In addition to simply submitting data, our system should be able to pull
up links to more information about the specific hardware that we are
using.  Very often workarounds exist for problems, and it would save us
even more time if users learned about them automatically.

Warren