Neil, +1 on your comments. I belong to that same category as I admin a fleet of servers on behalf of multiple clients; I also run a micro-datacenter at home (running openstack and a multitude of microservices/workloads on top); plus rinker with industrial devices (maker community). on the device side I run both Windows and GNU/Linux on desktops; plus Android and IOS on devices. Plus I rolled my own router/firewall based on dd-wrt.
On Jan 12, 2017 11:32 AM, "Neil Mayhew" <n...@neil.mayhew.name> wrote: > I think the issue here is that we’re looking at several distinct > categories of people who might be interested in a LUG, and it’s hard to be > relevant to all of them. > > In particular, I think there’s a difference between those who use Linux > professionally as a major part of their day job, and those who use it at > home on their own computers or in a side business. Those using it > professionally are interested in servers, cloud deployments, containers and > the like, but that’s typically not relevant to those using it primarily on > their own computers. Those people are interested in GUIs, gaming, office > suites and the like. > > For the professional people, I’m not sure that a LUG is the best option. > These days, Linux is so much a part of the corporate landscape that in many > cases people just take it for granted. I read that, even in Microsoft’s > Azure cloud hosting service, over 1/3 of the servers are running Linux, and > for other providers the proportion is probably much higher. I think that > people managing fleets of Linux servers are probably more interested in > groups for specific technologies, such as Docker or Hadoop, than they are > for Linux itself. Looking through the Tech category for Calgary > <https://www.meetup.com/find/tech/> on Meetup.com shows a lot of > technology-specific groups, although nothing specifically for Linux. Linux > doesn’t seem to be a ‘technology’ any more, it’s just a part of the tech > landscape. > > These professional people, however, most likely don’t run Linux on their > computers at home, or on their corporate-issue laptops. (These days, > they’re most likely to be running Mac, I hear.) They see Linux as simply a > means to an end in the datacentre. > > There’s a third, and growing, category I believe: the maker community. > These are people experimenting with embedded devices like Raspberry Pi and > Arduino, and developing the next generation of personal and industrial tech > in their garage, just as was done for the first personal/gaming computers. > I’m amazed by how quickly this community has embraced Linux as a part of > what they do, but I think it’s mainly because Linux is such an enabler for > these commoditized embedded processors. However, I get the impression that > only a small proportion of these people are also using Linux on their > personal computers. > > Personally, I span all three categories. I’m a freelance software > developer by day, writing exclusively for Linux, and deploying my work on > multiple servers in the cloud that I then administer. However, I also run > Linux on all my personal computers, both desktops and laptops. In addition, > I own two Raspberry Pis, and I run OpenWRT on my router. So I would find > almost any Linux-related talk interesting, and I could give talks on quite > a range of subjects. > > However, I’m not sure how many other people are in multiple categories. If > so, should we be focusing on just one or two categories? Let’s call the > ones I’ve identified ‘enterprise’, ‘personal’ and ‘maker’. Do we have > takers for all three? Are there any other categories we should be > considering? > > > _______________________________________________ > clug-talk mailing list > clug-talk@clug.ca > http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca > Mailing List Guidelines (http://clug.ca/ml_guidelines.php) > **Please remove these lines when replying >
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