I have purchased several laptops with SLED preinstalled. Two of them are
my sister’s and mine, the rest are used in my office by our employees. I
have registered my product at http://register.hp.com
Yes, we have left SLED on all of them but I usually install another OS
for dual booting. Almost always it’s Debian Squeeze (stable at the
moment) and on my laptop I also have Fedora-14 for testing purpose.
Dual booting: to be able to work with laptop in case SLED becomes
unusable. Yes, SLED seems very unstable in comparison to Debian. Still
not an issue with Debian, but SLED has recently become unusable three
times (period of half a year or so) - Xserver simply didn’t start after
updates. There weren’t also so critical issues with the system, but
which make many features, needed at work, unavailable. For example
LibreOffice’s Base is unusable. It’s really disappointing to realize
that an update stopped your work for several hours. Yes, I had to
install OpenOffice to solve this but it took some time. The last issue -
last kernel update broke my touchpad - I had to find and manually
install the previous one to “ressurect” it, but I’m really afraid of
updating laptops of our employees.
I am thinking to switch to another OS, but now I can’t stop work and
gather all laptops to reinstall them: too much work at the moment. Other distributions have a very nice and sometimes very useful
feature: at least two kernels are installed. It’s great to be able to
boot the kernel you know is working when you realize the new one which
came with updates has broken something, but it’s not the case with
SLED. I wish there were the same practice with SLED. (It’s about
improvement).
I also wish that the packages were tested carefully before they are
pushed as updates: LibreOffice Base bug was well known and reported
before it changed OpenOffice in SLED, but it seems nobody cares.
Purchasing laptops with SLED preinstalled I thought of having stable,
reliable and secure systems, which have quite a long term support and
are ready to be used “out of the box”. Now I think it wasn’t a good
investment.
Once I tried to contact HP but was informed that my laptop (HP620) with
SLED preinstalled wasn’t a supported product. It’s really difficult to
make a service request at Novell’s also. A CID is required, but I don’t
have one. To get it I have to contact my local Novell Customer Service
Center by phone, but there is no number in my country (Ukraine) and it
would be rather expensive to call abroad. Several people in my country
(and also from Russia as far as I remember) have contacted me having
seen my posts here just because they needed support in their native
language and because contacting HP and Novell is really quite
complicated (and sometimes useless as it was in my case).
I have purchased several laptops with SLED preinstalled. Two of them are
my sister’s and mine, the rest are used in my office by our employees. I
have registered my product at http://register.hp.com
Yes, we have left SLED on all of them but I usually install another OS
for dual booting. Almost always it’s Debian Squeeze (stable at the
moment) and on my laptop I also have Fedora-14 for testing purpose.
Dual booting: to be able to work with laptop in case SLED becomes
unusable. Yes, SLED seems very unstable in comparison to Debian. Still
not an issue with Debian, but SLED has recently become unusable three
times (period of half a year or so) - Xserver simply didn’t start after
updates. There weren’t also so critical issues with the system, but
which make many features, needed at work, unavailable. For example
LibreOffice’s Base is unusable. It’s really disappointing to realize
that an update stopped your work for several hours. Yes, I had to
install OpenOffice to solve this but it took some time. The last issue -
last kernel update broke my touchpad - I had to find and manually
install the previous one to “ressurect” it, but I’m really afraid of
updating laptops of our employees.
I am thinking to switch to another OS, but now I can’t stop work and
gather all laptops to reinstall them: too much work at the moment. Other distributions have a very nice and sometimes very useful
feature: at least two kernels are installed. It’s great to be able to
boot the kernel you know is working when you realize the new one which
came with updates has broken something, but it’s not the case with
SLED. I wish there were the same practice with SLED. (It’s about
improvement).
I also wish that the packages were tested carefully before they are
pushed as updates: LibreOffice Base bug was well known and reported
before it changed OpenOffice in SLED, but it seems nobody cares.
Purchasing laptops with SLED preinstalled I thought of having stable,
reliable and secure systems, which have quite a long term support and
are ready to be used “out of the box”. Now I think it wasn’t a good
investment.
Once I tried to contact HP but was informed that my laptop (HP620) with
SLED preinstalled wasn’t a supported product. It’s really difficult to
make a service request at Novell’s also. A CID is required, but I don’t
have one. To get it I have to contact my local Novell Customer Service
Center by phone, but there is no number in my country (Ukraine) and it
would be rather expensive to call abroad. Several people in my country
(and also from Russia as far as I remember) have contacted me having
seen my posts here just because they needed support in their native
language and because contacting HP and Novell is really quite
complicated (and sometimes useless as it was in my case).[/color]
I can confirm almost everything. Yes, in my opinion, SLED is one of the
most unstable distributions and it is really difficult if even ever
possible to get some help.
It seems that SLED is installed deliberately to easily earn money: we
take money for the product but we know that in the majority of cases it
will be changed, others will not be able to get help and will either
suffer with broken product or change to another operating system, so
there is nothing to care about for both HP and Novell. But in any case
they take money for it.
I have enough knowledge to work with almost all major Linux
distributions (including OpenSUSE), but I am completely confused with
this SLED. It is always broken. I tried to use it for four months but
was fed up with it. Three months ago I switched to Debian and forgot
about the time when something didn’t work.
it is really difficult if even ever possible to get some help.
[/color]
Yes, customers are not welcome. Once you buy OEM SLED you stay with it
as it is almost unable to get help or report an issue. But even if it is
reported hardly ever anyone cares about the fix.
I feel deeply sorry for your experience you had with HP and SLED. At
HP, we have a dedicated team and we try to focus on our customers. SLED
has problems, as other distributions have. The main issue seems to be
update and the ability to the SuSE team to synchronize all
repositories.
The ATI/AMD problem has been replicated and I hope the SuSE team will
be able to solve it ASAP.
As for the HP support guy who told you this is not a supported product,
please feel free to give me the name if you get similar response. HP
does support all systems they sell. This kind of behavior affects our
brand name. This is not compliant with our Standard Business of Conduct.
Maybe your system was more than 1 year old when you contacted the
support team (indeed, if your product is more than 1 year old, you
cannot get help from the support team unless of have an extended period
of warranty)
I disagree with you. As an HP employee, I know we are not perfect but we
take care of our customers.
We know several corporations/users who use HP with SLED OEM. The
problems reported are fixed provided the patch is accepted through
Novell Update process.
Please feel free to report your problems, I will open a new case (HP
support)