[clug] Growing Pains

[Karun Dambiec]

On Wed, 2009-09-16 at 12:26 +1000, Robert Edwards wrote:
> My other thought for the day:
> 

> As Linux has become more mainstream and the proprietry Unices have
> largely gone away (with the possible exception of MacOSX/BSD), we
> often see people coming to CLUG who are expecting Linux to give them
> a similar experience to the Windoze experience they are used to.

In my view, there needs to be more recognition that it is not the same.
Although some of the GUI interfaces such as KDE are similiar in some way
to Windows.

As a result I am mostly using Mac OS X except for servers, as it offers
me a reasonable balance between open source software and proprietary. It
would be far better for me if Mac OS X was completely under a open
source licence however. 
>  And
> they can tend to have much less technical ability or interest. These
> sorts of new Linux users are, to some extent, "harder work" for the
> sorts of people who helped me get going way back in the day. And so
> we don't see so many of the "old school" at the "User Group" meetings
> anymore. This is sad, for me, but not unexpected.

Perhaps many have moved onto the development conferences such as Wiki
Conference, etc.

> 
> So we are left with this sort of "are we a technical group, or a group
> for users" question. Do we aim to keep the interests of the technical
> folk or to get new users involved? The patterns of who attends the
> main meetings based on the topics to be discussed are very revealing
> on this point. I hope we can satisfy both, although I "may be dreaming".