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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)."
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.
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
No, as stated by Netcraft, only BSD User Groups are dying.
Installing Linux is easier and there's lots of online help. LUGs also have the use for a social community and can let people meet face to face and discuss things. I find that real life is a much higher data rate and can save me hours of time online.
It also never hurts to brush up on inter-personal skills at the same time.
...consultants. Time for Ubuntu to move into the enterprise.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
User groups are made by users, that is people.
And people still need to meet each other for brinstorming, experience exchanges and, of course, a good cup of your favourite beverage!
Try doing this on a mailing list!
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
My wife didn't want me going anymore because of all the babes that were there.
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.
We do need LUGs !!!
/Linux bug has just started in a true sense, therefore this calls fore enthusiastic people to common under single roof.
LUG is not only about solving or troubleshooting other user's Linux problems, but also about knowing and meeting with people who share the same mindset(mostly). Email is good but effectively in person conversation prevails over emails.
Definitely its not the end of LUGs, but we need more awareness among people and students alike about LUGs. The FOSS
-- "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration" - TAE --
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.
Of course we still need LUG's
I always thought LUG was an acronym for Lesbians Until Graduation, one of the best forms of birth control in high school/college I've ever seen.
I would have to say "Yes, LUGs are dying out". They served a purpose before the days of cheap, high reliability servers, which lead to "Wiki technology". Before this happened the way to get "how to" tips was to go to LUGs or take a chance on a number of uncollected sources like boards and Usenet. I suspect LUGs will still be popular in academic settings but will go away for the public in general.
Yeah, it's not 1997 anymore and practially anybody can install Linux on their chosen piece of hardware. However, there are so many facets to linux and so many people are focused on doing different things with linux, it's great to interact with other Linux enthusiests and broaden your horizons.
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!
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
I am in a nice sized LUG. Would guess over 200 people if not a lot more. Yet I admit I never go to meetings. The mailing lists is really where all of the action is. Need an answer quick? Email the list, rather than wait till the once a month meeting. Also a lot of us tech types are stereotypically introverted, so we dont need to attend a meeting and are more likely to participate via an online method (mailing list, irc, etc).
We had a college intern who worked for the same company I did each summer. Every year he seemed to get better and better at IT/Tech. Then he got a gf, and all his progress calm to a halt.
Once you get a gf, your tech progress stops, and you will be at that level for the rest of your life. Just make sure it is high enough to earn a living. Yeah, I could have been an uber-geek, but I traded it all away for some sex. *wink*
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
I think the word you're looking for is "ubiquity."
It's interesting.. Our local LUG (FLUX in S. Florida) has been wrestling with declining (still respectable, but declining) attendance for a couple years. We've batted around ideas, but I guess part of the reason is that the novelty of Linux has worn out. It's somewhat pedestrian now, considering how many suits use it without even knowing.
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.
As a mac user, I remember the days of the MUG, the Mac User Group. We were a strange collection of people all with the fiery zeal for the Macintosh. We met together because it wasn't uncommon to be the only Mac user at school, at work, sometimes at home. There wasn't anyone to associate with who felt how we felt. We were the advocates for the Mac, we supported each other, we traded software, we helped each other out.
The internet came along, and for a brief time, the MUGs represented themselves online. It was a great way to distribute software, arrange meetings, etc. The MUGs didn't seem to make it though. It just made more sense to people that they all come together of their own accord. And several Mac sites made that possible.
Sometime around 2000 or 2001, people who were part of the online Mac Advocacy group received a letter from Guy Kawasaki who led the group, saying that Advocacy of the Mac wasn't really necessary, that the mac had made it and wasn't going to die away. I think that was really the end of the MUG. No longer was the Mac a dying machine, nor Apple a dying company. The need to group together was gone, and over the past 5 years or so the platform has become robust enough that you're not hard pressed to find a Mac user around.
If you've read this far, you likely wonder what my point is. I didn't even know there were LUGs to be honest. I imagine they were as invisible to me as MUGs were to the populace back in the day. The internet, in it's current form solves all the problems that UGs were used for. Support, both technical and social, and demonstration.
It's a little bit like the World Fair, back in the 19th and 20th centuries. Everyone got together to show off inventions, ideas, and concepts. When telecommunications took off, there stopped being a reason to hold the Fair.
In Ithaca New York we have what we call the "Ithaca Free Software Association," which is a computer user's group which is focused on promoting and supporting free software in general, rather than any particular operating system. We welcome anyone who wants to use free software, whether they run GNU/Linux, *BSD, Windows, or MacOS. Meeting face-to-face each month is a great way to meet new members, though most of our communication is done over the email list.
:)
Meeting face-to-face is also how conduct our events in the local community. GNU/Linux installfests, "Vendor" booths at local technology events (we have three higher-ed institutions in the area, as well as numerous K-12 schools), as well as Software Freedom Day, and a few other events we stage each year.
So, essentially, we're a group of folks who like computers, software, etc. But we're also a community service organization, intent on helping people solve technological problems with free software. Whether that's someone's grandma, or a local school district.
I'd post the URL, but I don't want to break my Web server...
I'm still here!
They're using their grammar skills there.
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
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