Is the LUG a thing of the past?

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)."

Comments

local forms yes,

[tomstdenis]

It isn't 1997 anymore. We don't need to meet up in shopping malls to trade 1.44M discs. LUG over the net makes sense as having a community to rely on for troubleshooting is what makes or breaks a distro.

Yes.

[bjornnlc]

Yes. The majority of LUGs I know disappeared in 2004, only leaving the larger ones behind. The quality on the remaining LUGs are top notch, so I guess this is a natural phenomenon that occurs after every hype.

It depends on what you get from LUG meetings

[erroneus]

Some people use it as a reason to get out on the weekend. They do barbecues and cookouts, they play network games and otherwise just hang out... and occasionally address a Linux issue or two.

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.

LUGs: as Bad as Mensa

[logicnazi]

I visited a LUG once because someone famous was coming by to speak (Stallman? Raymond?) and was so turned off by the whole experience I would never want to go back. The speaker was fine but hearing about upcoming meetings felt like going over to digg and reading one of those stories like '8 tips for using Bash' where they tell you obvious shit like how to turn on color in ls.

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