Is the LUG a thing of the past? 162
tinahdee writes "Linux User Groups dying out? LUG leaders report that attendance is down — but mailing list traffic is still good. Do we still need LUGs, given the ease of installation and ubiquitousness of online information about Linux? Lots of people say, yes, we still need LUGs (and some disagree)."
local forms yes, (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes. (Score:5, Interesting)
It depends on what you get from LUG meetings (Score:5, Interesting)
If you go there to pick up chicks... uh no.
Some people, I have seen, take their LUGs very seriously... they attend them as if they were attending church! For those people, it's a traditionally religious experience... in the most literal sense possible. (inside joke)
I find most of these LUGs to be rather annoying. The ones that are little more than an excuse to get out of the house on a Saturday are pretty good though... burgers 'n beer are always good and a LUG is as good a reason as any.
Re:local forms yes, (Score:3, Interesting)
People make presentations about their offerings, and offer Services for a fee; we get to talk about local and topical issues.. like the impact of Vista on the local IT and user companies; tips and tricks used by Sysadmins etc. etc. Emails, mailing lists etc. are a very poor substitute - if one doesn't already know a bit about a topic, say SOA or JBoss, an email cannot spark much interest.
A 30-minute presentation on how an entire hospital has been converted to Open Source products and technologies by the company that did it... makes an instant impact. Wednesday evening, I am attending a presentation on Open Source products and services, at the local CSI (computer Society of India) chapter.
As I remarked elsewhere, Linux (the kernel) is a very small aspect of LUGs and the FOSS world. Time to move off from LUGs.
LUG's are definitely still important! (Score:3, Interesting)
One of the things that our LUG has been doing forever is inviting our members to do presentations on things their working on or give talks in areas of their interest/expertise. These presentations have run the gambit from WiFi Security to modeling objects with PovRay to FUSE. We've have distribution comparisions (with proponents for each distribution explaining the pros/cons).
What's cool about a LUG is that your likely to have people who are experts in extremely diverse areas who are all Linux nerds getting together and hanging out.
It's not everyday you get to see a hardware engineer, an English teacher, a chiropractor and a pharamcologist comparing notes on what's the best window manager!
LUGs (Score:3, Interesting)
The interesting thing is that I see a lot more Linux usage in corporate environments than ever before. There are lots of requests for administration and setup from SMBs, and in my 9-to-5 corporate IT employer, there are Linux servers running production loads.
Running Linux is no big deal anymore, so has lost some of its attraction. But I noticed the Mac groups have had a resurgence.. Maybe it's in cycles.. I was in a Mac user group a long time ago (about the time of the Centris and Quadra machines), and they faded for a while, but came back. With the Dell offerings, more corporate deployments, "good enough" improvements of Linux in corporate loads, etc.., I think the groups will grow again. The demographics will be different, but people will come.
Plus the Internet has made the community a lot larger. Before it was hard to find like-minded folks.
LUGs: as Bad as Mensa (Score:4, Interesting)
I mean this was at a world class research university (caltech) and when I had trouble getting X to compile I would ask the guy down the hall who would then execute some totally crazy command line using four pipes awk and sed which magically fixed the problem. But instead of being the experts the people at the LUG where the linux equivalents of old school Mac users, trading little tips without any real knowledge. I liked the idea of a LUG but only if it has presentations of the sort of shit on kerneltrap and it's the best users not the worst who attend.
Basically I got the sense that LUGs ware a lot like groups like MENSA (supposedly for smart people). Namely that the best people (most knowledgeable, most savy, smartest) weren't going to come because they were all in universities, or working at tech corporations that provided them with more than enough technological/intellectual stimulation. In the beginning it might have been different but once linux adoption was wide enough in academia and the business world it seems inevitable that LUGs would sink to the lowest common denominator.
Maybe the proximity of caltech really biased my experience and LUGs in other areas are different but somehow I think the internet has worked as a great leveler giving the experts even in the most rural places better options and leaving for LUGs people who can't decipher the man pages
Re:local forms yes, (Score:3, Interesting)
LUGs don't fill the same role they used to. I remember, back in the day, the only way I could get my hands on install disks was from the local LUG. Someone there worked someplace with a fat (for the time) pipe and was able to download the software off the 'net. I'd give him a box of blank disks, and he'd throw the software on them.
At the time, I was able to dial up a local BBS...but it was mostly social stuff, some really bad porn, a few Windows programs...certainly nothing about Linux. The only place I could talk with others about Linux was at the LUG. The only place I could get guidance on installing or troubleshooting Linux was at the LUG. There were precious few HOW-TO's and I couldn't very well RTFM when the FM was either on some Gopher site I couldn't access or hadn't even been written yet.
LUGs these days are still great if you've got a tricky problem or need some help troubleshooting. They're great to actually meet other human beings and learn from their experiences/mistakes. It's a good way to network, meet other people running Linux in the area. They're still useful...
But your average person doesn't need to go to the LUG to get installation media. You can generally download it from the web, and many distributions will mail you media for little or no charge. Installation is generally easy these days, especially with something like Ubuntu. And there's plenty of documentation available on the web for just about anything you can run in to.