I personally belong mostly to the enduser site now. I was a developer on
a HP Superdome but that's a while ago. And I am interested on what is
going on at the server side, just to get more depth inside of what is
everybody talking (emailing) about, e.g. docker etc. Currently I am
using Linux Mint on my old laptop and other flavours in VM's on my Win10
machine. My Raspberry Pi3 is the newest toy for me and more capable of
doing things than my old laptop (32bit). That way I am interested in all
3 directions. That would give us a lot of topics for meetings. Perhaps
we can do one of each direction per month? (1. month = personal, 2.
month = enterprise, 3. month = maker ?) - just an idea.
On 2017-01-12 11:29 AM, Neil Mayhew 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?
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