[Ubuntu Chicago] (WAS - Re: ... A Bust)

[Richard A. Johnson]

On Monday 17 December 2007, Kevin Harriss wrote:
| One potential thing you could do is to work with various Linux groups
| in the area to hold events that might help draw out more people.  I
| bet there are a bunch of people in the various groups that use ubuntu
| and wouldn't mind helping out but just don't know where to start.

Ya, only problem is most of those groups aren't using Ubuntu anymore. Ya, I am 
looking at you Gentoo using UIC freaks :p

| Also you have to realize that it can be hard to get
| nerds/geeks/whatever to leave a computer and come hang out.  I have
| noticed this problem with the ChiGLUG and have tried various things to
| get people to come some work better than others.  The first thing I
| would suggest doing to to talk to the various school lugs and tell
| them to contact you guys when they do an installfest or have a booth
| at their school and try to help them out.  A major problem I have
| noticed with this group and the ChiGLUG is trying to get people from
| the city to go out to the burbs and the people from the burbs to go to
| the city.  I really don't known an ideal situation for solving this.
| These are just some of my rants/raves/suggestions I may not be a
| ubuntu contributor but I do us it at work :( and submit bug reports
| but I am a general linux enthusiast so if you have any questions or
| want to do something in conjunction with the chicago lug feel free to
| let me know.

See, I love getting away from the house to hang out with the ChiGLUG guys as 
it seems we are just geeky enough to enjoy hanging out and hacking. I would 
love to be able to make it down for a programming tonight, but since that is 
a tough one to do, I was thinking of attempting to create a similar buzz out 
here, however it is difficult to find many people interested in development 
in the area. Maybe I will start some noise with my blog and see if anyone is 
interested, come up with a great development idea and meet up to work on it 
as a hobby and not as a job.

The hobby and job thing...that is a huge problem with Ubuntu Chicago, it 
almost feels like a job now. We have to do this, we have to do that, 
get`r`done! My goal is to work in the FLOSS world professionally again. I 
don't want to get stuck behind a monitor hacking on shitty VB.NET, MFC BS, 
creating proprietary shit that I can't show off to my friends w/o them paying 
an arm and a leg. The proprietary shit is part of the reason I am separating 
myself from Ubuntu a tad bit as well. Our kernel is horrible with all of the 
binary modules. Half of it doesn't work, and the half that does work only 
works when it wants to. Like Freddy said in a post or two back, there needs 
to be a solid product to promote, and right now I feel Ubuntu doesn't have 
that product anymore, and left it back in 2006 with Dapper, Edgy, and Feisty.

It is sad, Edgy was a 4 month dev cycle, shorter than all of the others, yet 
it is far better than Gutsy, and definitely better than what I am currently 
seeing with Hardy. If you want to promote this stuff to "new" users, don't 
you think you should get the input of "new" users to see what they would like 
to see with their system? The community is to much out of touch, to many 
people burning out, and the lack of top knotch developers. Ubuntu strives to 
be the best "newb" distro their is, and this is fine, but it is pulling in 
way to many "newb" developers. That isn't a bad thing per se, but it isn't 
helping Ubuntu.

That is why you are seeing distros such as PC Linux OS and Foresight pick up 
steam. They have had the chance to sit back and see what the community really 
thinks, and have then catered to that community. Fedora has done the same, 
they have created probably the best KDE distro I have seen to date, well 
except for Corel Linux back in the 90s.

Who knows, maybe Ubuntu will make it back to the top some day. Anywho, back to 
creating a common bond, it will be tough for Ubuntu Chicago. There are some 
who want to develop and work on projects and there are some who do not. It 
needs to be advocational and it hasn't been in quite some time.

So if anyone is up for a "Programming Tonight" like the Chicago LUG does, 
speak up or forever hold your peace. Maybe we can create some neat, hang out 
at a nice quiet location with a few drinks, some cigars, and hack away. Who 
cares if we don't create something stellar, but it would be a great way to 
learn from one another. Now that I am down with, lets get jiggy with it :)

-- 
Richard A. Johnson
nixternal at kubuntu.org
GPG Key: 0x2E2C0124
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