While Enterprise Support is a common way for distros to make money, regular consumers are often left with only community support.
One thing I am very passionate about is getting more people into Linux. Freeing ourselves from the shackles of Microsoft is a huge deal, especially since they have a history of locking down their OS. However, for many people, it’s very difficult to get off of Windows because of the lack of support options. My hope with this article is to encourage more than just my own company, which offers technical support for consumers who use desktop Linux, to provide opportunities for individuals as opposed to enterprises to get help with Linux on a more professional level.
Enterprise Support is awesome, but not really great for desktop users.
It’s great that there are companies and associations that provide enterprise support as a paid option. It’s great because it ensures that in enterprise environments, there is a number to call if something goes wrong. However, it’s just not going to cut it for regular users, as with enterprise-grade support, there’s inevitably enterprise-grade pricing as well. For example, a Red Hat Enterprise Linux Standard Workstation Subscription, which includes customer support during normal business hours, costs $328.90 (USD) a year, which is a lot of money to pay, and what if you don’t want to use RHEL, but Fedora or Arch Linux or Linux Mint instead? With those distros, there just aren’t any options even at the enterprise level, let alone the consumer level. There’s a huge missed opportunity to bring more people to Linux.
Community Support is Not Enough
While the wider community can be helpful (it certainly helped me out a lot when I first started using Linux, coming from Mac), it isn’t going to work for everyone. Sometimes people will want a number they can call when they have a technical issue. Especially for less technically savvy users, going to a forum to ask for tech support might not be ideal, especially if it is a more urgent problem.
When there is no customer support line, there will be people left behind in a wider shift to Linux in light of the many problems with Microsoft and Apple as of late. This is the kind of disaster we need to stop, and the only way I see us getting out of this consumer tech support gap is to offer technical support as a service. That’s what we’re doing here at Personal Tech Help, and we encourage other companies to start offering the same.