Dear everyone, we've had the great oportunity of presenting Debian at the LinuxTag 2011 [0] with a booth, kindly organized by Annette, that we shared with Kanotix [1] and aptosid [2]. Our working together was fun and productive as we had a lot of talks with each other as well as with guests that asked about our relationship and Debian and its derivatives in general.
It was refreshing to see how many "normal users" care about giving back and partly even know about ongoing discussions in Debian. We've had many discussions about 'rolling', its possible implementations, its effect on users, often even if it would bring back users that nowadays use Ubuntu. Speaking of which, I, personally, found it interesting how many users see Debian as the great effort but for some reasons prefer Ubuntu as their desktop system. Particularly, when a single missing package (for instance some funny desktop feature) would make the difference. We all encouraged users to use 'reportbug', share their experiences with Debian, help improve it in whatever way they can think of. Almost all of them figured they could do something, even if it's "simple" stuff. "We can't fix bugs that we don't know about" was possibly the most repeated sentence during the four days of the event. And it seemed to make sense to them. :) Another interesting topic was appreciation of the work of others, (seemingly) completely unrelated to Debian. For instance, while most of our guests at the booth cared for stability, thorough planning of releases, the Debian package management etc. and therefor don't like using distributions that don't profit from that -- when it came to interesting, new efforts like '/run', they all appreciated how other distributions (or projects in general) go a different way and by that work on things everyone can profit from in the long run. I, personally, never saw that many people give credit to projects they usually don't like much for whatever reason. I liked how this development in our community improves Free Software more generally than just single projects. All in all, that were great four days. I don't know about official numbers about visitors or anything. But I do know that we all had fun, that we've met new, interesting people as well as "the old guys" from the last few years. I'd like to thank Annette for making the effort and organizing everything, Alex for shipping the merch stuff to us, and -- of course -- all our helpers at the booth, be that DDs or total newbies. I can't list them all -- sorry -- but rest assured, we've had an interesting, refreshing, and big team of about 10 to 15 people everyday who offered their help. Everyone (as far as I know) was free to see whatever talk they liked (except for Zack's talk that everyone wanted to hear), and we still kept the booth running. Thanks to all of you who registered on the wiki page [3] so we were able to plan; thanks to all who just jumped in whenever it seemed neccessary. And special thanks to those who worked just as hard and literally just started getting to know Debian better! Great fun; you should consider coming to next year's LinuxTag! Hauke [0] http://www.linuxtag.org/2011/ [1] http://www.kanotix.com [2] http://www.aptosid.com [3] http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEventsDe/2011/LinuxTag -- .''`. Jan Hauke Rahm <j...@debian.org> www.jhr-online.de : :' : Debian Developer www.debian.org `. `'` Member of the Linux Foundation www.linux.com `- Fellow of the Free Software Foundation Europe www.fsfe.org
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