On Mon, 28 Jan 2013 09:56:00 +0000
Victor Churchill <victorchurchill@???> wrote:
> The LUG is different things to different people. It has always worked
> pretty well as a group for self-help and information interchange
> between members who are pretty committed and established Linux users.
> My observation would be that it has perhaps worked less well as a
> vehicle for introducing Linux to new or potentially new users and
> supporting them in the early stages of getting to know Linux.
>
> Typical Saturday meetings seem to be largely attended by hard-core
> long-term members and less so by new users, and I fear that there may
> be many new/potential users who come to one meeting and don't come
> again because they feel out of their depth.
I don't know if things have changed in the last five year or so since
we moved too far away from Hampshire to make attending LUG meets easy
for me but meetings were mostly very informal - people turned up, found
a space and got on with whatever they wanted to do that day.
This would in itself be off-putting to a complete newcomer so perhaps,
if it hasn't already been done, there should be a way of breaking the
ice for some one new.
> (It also seems to me that there has a bit of a downward trend in the
> "long term user attendance", maybe due to the way that Linux itself
> has changed over the years. That's a different discussion.)
If it is the case that long term users are not turning up it probably
is because there isn't the need for as much hand-holding with current
Linux distros. Even Debian, which used to have a reputation for being
difficult to get running, is nowadays a breeze.
(It took about ten minutes to get a minimal install of Wheezy up and
running on an aopen Xcube box a few weeks ago and about the same length
of time to get ssh/rsync working so I can login to it remotely and use
it as a headless backup system)
--
John Lewis
Debian & the GeneWeb genealogical data server
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