TS Tickets Survey
Results of broad searches through tech support RT to see the relationships between what we deal with.
Very rough searches so far, can be easily tweaked but these will give us an overview.
Initial Broad Search
Search through the entire Tech Support Queue, no time restrictions (so about 7 years).
video, graphics, display, screen, monitor 413 tickets
internet, network, modem, connection 538 Tickets
panel, interface, cursor, key, keyboard, mouse 165 Tickets 134 without the word key, which may have brought in some other tickets
boot 336 Tickets This one is a little iffy because some refer to booting up the bios, others to starting ubuntu, and it looks like some for just starting the interface.
Since August 1st, 2010
Search terms and resulting number of issues in the Tech Support queue
video, graphic, display, screen, monitor: 196 tickets
network, internet, modem, connect: 177
panel, interface, cursor, key, mouse: 69
boot: 186, could represent any number of issues that happen between pressing the power button and logging in.
sound, audio, speaker: 37
print: 62
This search found 727 tickets out of all 2174 since August 2010. The others may be the result of not enough information on ticket creation or poor naming of the ticket, or even unique problems that I haven't found a way to locate yet
Final Conclusion
I'm going to give this in Human readable form because theres a lot of raw data that would really be a pain to read through
Most Common Issues
Intel graphics chips, when a problem, are a HUGE problem (i8XX bugs), but generally they work well enough for basic usage. Other than that for video problems drivers related problems are big, and are mostly easily solved (update xorg.conf, or install/reinstall open/proprietary drivers). Many tickets labeled as video problems seem to really be ram problems. Replacing or re-seating the RAM then causes the computer to boot just fine.
For desktop interaction the only major issues are keyboard and panel related. Especially for laptops keyboard pose problems with sticky keys and hardware faults, but overall there are a some times that software plays a role in GNOME. The GNOME panel also frequently becomes unusable from either user config error or gconf errors. Either way resetting it to default is quick and easy.
Hard drives are the root of boot errors. I would say half of those errors can be solved with a quick fsck on the root partition while the rest are critical drive failures.
Sound issues are minor, install hardware or make simple adjustments (In my experience here and elsewhere, Ubuntu 10.04 makes it very hard and confusing to change basic sound settings, even for me. That negates the fact that it does have a lot of easily accessible options).
For networking, the Network Manager is really getting in our way. It refuses to show up, and apparently is confusing for our users to use. Many times all it takes to finish the ticket is changing a simple setting. For Wifi, vast majority is hardware install. Dedicated PCI cards are not a problem, but USB adapters are difficult to deal with and slow to move through.
Printers pop up all the time, old ones (like parallel port ones) usually work without a problem. Newer Brother's and HP's just need the driver installed and then they are happy.
And here it is, my suggestions for things to look at in a new Distro
Simply configured panel, meaning the method of configuration is somewhat simple. GNOME and gconf have proven that they cannot provide consistent results, resulting in panel misconfiguration and sometimes a confused/broken desktop. Maybe another GNOME distro would be better? Does KDE have similar problems? I think this is big issue because it is EXTREMELY frustrating to have to bring your computer in or call for something that really should never happen. I know I always hate it when my panel disappears.
Maybe an easy way of dealing with video drivers? And not just for us. Sometimes the user wants to install a newer dedicated card and in the process of trying to get it to work breaks all those X packages, making our job harder. I know some distros do a better job than others at detecting which drivers your card needs. I actually found that out from Ubuntu 11.10, I ran the updater and it automatically grabbed the correct recent nVIDIA driver for a current generation card. It was kinda nice not having to do anything....
Get a kernel with solid support for the wireless cards, unless we want to tell people clearly NOT TO GET USB ADAPTERS.
Simple, usable GUI's for printer and sound setup. Maybe we can cut down on the number of people who need to come in just because their sound is muted
I don't know if theres something we can do on the Distro side to ease the flood of hard drive failures. Maybe a newer Distro won't lose track of the filesystem so often and need fsck to boot.