Blair Smith, a post doc, and myself had a great time showing LSU student gnu/linux at Free Speech today. We gave away all the CDs we brought and people wanted more than I could burn on batteries. The weather was beautiful and lots of people stopped by. They taught us a lot about people's familiarity with free software.
The porting of a few good applications to Windows and Mac is a winning strategy. Most of the people who stopped by asked if the distributions we were handing out came with Firefox, Open Office and the GIMP. It's nice to be able to tell them that those applications work better in their native environment. Mac users, familiar with Safari, have great respect for KDE and are thrilled to learn that Konqueror does even more under gnu/linux. These applications have introduced them to the benefits of free software and created brand loyalty. Six click install live CDs are the easiest way for them to get and keep using their favorite applications until vendors start selling computers with free software installed at a price point that reflects it's true relative cost to non free sotware. I've only scratched the surface at LSU and there's plenty more to be done. Because few people actually use free software for their primary desktop, most people don't know what they are missing. Even the power users at ACM who think they are familiar with gnu/linux don't realize the performance and feature gains available. Opening a c source file in a new tab from a web site, sftp transparency and other very nice KDE things surprised some ACM members when I demonstrated a little hack to them last week. Everyone is impressed by an E16 desktop with it's transparency, multiple desktops, pagers and speed, especially when that speed comes from a five or eight year old laptop. I have to do this again with more CDs, fliers pointing to resources like the CCCC desktop sig and brlug mailing lists, better power supplies and more light and magic in general. Finally, I have to thank all of the nice people who helped make it happen, especially Michelle Lowery and Susan Reed. I'll have pictures up eventually.
