My week-end was full, but between shooting at a 3 nights long metal festival, a marathon and a traditional food festival, I managed to find the time and attend this year edition of the Linux Install Fest in Bucharest. organized by ROSEdu.
I didn't stay until the end, but it was, as expected, quite big: attendants, helpers and staff at something around 100 people, not bad at all. An opportunity to see a lot of first year students from the
Politehnica University but also old friends from various local communities.
The most installed distro there was
Debian (with a classic GNOME 2 interface), that's what is installed in the university labs and that's what the most students want on their machines. The second choice was
Ubuntu, because is popular and close to Debian. Other distros like
openSUSE or
Fedora are seen like something students can play with later, when they have more experience.
Old Linux people have the tendency to say "install fests are not needed any more, you can install a distro now with a series of mouse clicks", however this is not entirely true, many of them had problems, the top two ones i saw was lack of available partitions and space (all the hard drive filled with 4
primary Windows partitions) and a broken post-install GRUB, which does not list the old Windows install any more (everyone is dual-booting).
On a side of the hall there was a series of "demo" machines, I noticed there a Debian, a MINT, a Fedora, an openSUSE and, for the laughs, a Hanna Montana Linux (a couple of guys moved to replace that with Trisquel). I saw nobody playing with the MINT, HM or Fedora machines.
On the Fedora side,
Răzvan Sandu offered himself to man the demo station, but with the lack of activity there, he roamed the place and used his charm with Debian users, giving talks on general FOSS issues. The machine itself was total boring: a bland
Desktop install with only GNOME Shell and no application to show, it was sitting there and displaying the desktop wallpaper.
Actually I saw one of the helpers showing a student the demo station and when getting to the Fedora one he said "this is Fedora, it has an unusual interface, unlike you know from the lab" and then, probably after noticing me, he added "but is still a Linux, with the same working".
Myself, I took
pictures, trolled a little and helped a bit with a couple of
Ubuntu installs and an
openSUSE, but didn't stay until the final parts with beer and such. Also, I used the opportunity to play a bit with MINT and Cinnamon, still looking forward for MATE.
Overall, the event was useful and well organized, waiting for the next year edition.
Posts
I wonder what people were saying about Unity because from GNOME 2 user's point of view, I don't see much of difference between Unity and GNOME 3.
ReplyDeleteIf Ubuntu was so crowded, then it might not be about environments after all.
most of them go with the classic look of Debian, Ubunty still has high usage grace to its good brand name. those students are not former GNOME 2 users, they are current Windows users and learning Linux because this is required at school. if it is a "weird" OS, then it can have also a "weird" UI, i guess.
Deletefound an interesting piece of data Jiří: http://lif.rosedu.org/statistics.php: a lot of Debian and Ubuntu installs, very few MINT and SUSE, nothing else.
DeleteWell, I guess it's going to get better with MATE coming to Fedora. People will have more choice.
DeleteBut without promoting, even the best product doesn't sell. Here at Brno universities, it's different. I'm not saying we're beating Ubuntu, but it's head-to- head. Both technical universities are using CentOS, one of them is now switching to RHEL. It's obvious students tend to use Fedora more than elsewhere.
BTW there is one new active ambassador from Romania. But he is not from Bucharest, I think from Sibiu.
Yes, I know Iosif, I am talked him into becoming an ambassador :) However, Sibiu is far away and he is still a high school student and his Linux knowledge is limited. But he's learning, both Linux, computing in general and community stuff.
DeleteThe bias is natural, if in Brno the universities use CentOS/RHEL, is expected the students will use Fedora or a derivative (I guess Red Hat having offices there also help, with universities which can get good prices and with students, which may pursue a job opportunity), here the universities use Debian, students go with Debian derivatives.