Re: [LUG] Meeting in Paignton

[Matt Lee <mattl@xxxxxxx>]

Having read all the comments in this thread, I thought I'd come and 
post my own.

** Disclaimer: I am (as you may tell by my email address) a part of the 
FSF **

Assuming everyone is clear on the indisputable fact that Linux is not 
an operating system, I can see clear benefit in making reference to GNU 
for the simple fact that someday, we might not be using the Linux 
kernel - not saying we're all going to switch to GNU/Hurd, but the 
possibility is there.

The GNU system we use today is the result of much work on the part of 
Richard Stallman and the FSF, and simply referring to this mixture of 
GNU project and Linux kernel as anything other than GNU/Linux only 
weakens the efforts of the free software movement, I believe.

As for Apple - there's a very obvious reason why Richard doesn't ask 
for it to be called GNU/Mac OS X or GNU/Windows when you have Cygwin 
installed - the GNU project didn't set out to make a set of free tools 
for Apple or Red Hat to package up in a nice way and ship to users of 
proprietary operating systems - they set out to create a free UNIX, and 
that's what GNU/Linux is.

The skills learnt today on Debian GNU/Linux could easily be transferred 
to GNU/Hurd or GNU/Mattx or whatever - personally, I see no reason to 
refer to things as OS/Kernel, it's not like Darwin/XNU or Windows 
XP/Whatever help us any - I'd prefer to refer to it as GNU, but 
unfortunately that's not an option any longer.

Having a GNU/Linux user group makes sense - the majority of users will 
be using GNU/Linux in some form and it encourages new members to 
understand the nature of free software and the freedoms offered by the 
GNU GPL.

I don't want GNU/Linux to remain the realm of geeks and hackers, I want 
it to be used by more and more regular users. In all honesty, I don't 
really care about the geeks and the hackers, because they'll use it 
anyway. What free software can do is amazing, and what GNU/Linux can do 
is amazing too, but I think the movement needs to focus its efforts now 
on helping regular, non-technical people to use GNU/Linux.

I'd like to see an end to a lot of things..

* Desktop environments shipping with a terminal on the taskbar.
* Inconsistent interfaces/toolkits
* The phrase RTFM - let's give people the places to find information 
themselves - Wikipedia is really good example of this.

Apple have shown us how to take an Unix-like operating system and make 
it work for everyone - if you look how different Mac OS X is now to the 
last released version of NeXTSTEP, you'll see the kind of improvements 
we're starting to see.

Right now, I believe Debian is the distribution that the community 
should promote to new users. Debian testing, to be exact. It can be 
easily upgraded, seems rock solid, supports a beautiful and consistent 
interface in the form of GNOME and hot plugging of devices works like a 
dream. I find KDE to be Windows with eye-candy, whereas GNOME and its 
spatial interface actually works. My mother, having never used GNOME 
before was able to login, open a browser and log onto her GMail account 
without problems - this is the kind of thing we need to promote, and 
promoting the purpose of free software let's us do just that. 
GNU/Linux. GNU/Linux. GNU/Linux. GNU/Linux.

matt

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