Paid support?

[derekeverett]

I see nothing has been posted recently regarding opinions etc. on paid support for Ubuntu.

Personally, I enjoy these forums and learning as much as I can but I am also interested in hearing if anybody has used paid support in the past and how helpful they found it?

I would love to convert my office one day. But there is no way I could get my boss to touch the idea without having support available. So maybe one day I might actually get to find out for myself.

I'm also curious as to what they can/will help you with and what they won't. If I say I can't listen to mp3's will they tell me about my restricted options and walk me through it? Do they support the apps in the repositories or just the installation of them?

Really I'm interested in anything anybody has to say about this. So please post liberally folks. I assure you I'll read them all!

Thanks.

[derekeverett]

As further example.. I was recently having difficulty converting video using ffmpeg2theora. I received a solution in these forums that required adding the medibuntu repository. Would paid support have saved me the 2 days of grief I spent trying to get that working properly?

You know that might have been worth the $250 lol. I would have likely paid double that day....

[JohnFH]

I'd be very interested in any answers to this as well. However, being on Ubuntu Forums I doubt many people here will have paid for commercial support offered by Canonical. Why not email them directly asking exactly what you've asked here?

[derekeverett]

I might have to do just that. Figured I'd ask it first here anyways.

$250/$900 these are fair sums to pay without having answers to some of these questions I think.

That being said.. if I like some of the answers I might try it out!

[3rdalbum]

As further example.. I was recently having difficulty converting video using ffmpeg2theora. I received a solution in these forums that required adding the medibuntu repository. Would paid support have saved me the 2 days of grief I spent trying to get that working properly?

You know that might have been worth the $250 lol. I would have likely paid double that day....

ffmpeg2theora is in the Universe repository, which is not officially supported by Ubuntu. And Medibuntu isn't officially anything to do with Canonical either, so I doubt their consultants would recommend enabling it. At least, not on their company's time :-)

Linux Format did an article quite a while back where they took out paid support with Red Hat, Novell and Canonical and tested the support staff with some simulated scenarios. All three companies scored highly; I think Canonical got the same score as Red Hat from memory.

[derekeverett]

Maybe that's what I should do..

Choose another distro to try for a while, one that I know little about.

I'll pay for paid support and see what I think.

That might be fun.. lol maybe.