[SLUG] For the record

[john at johnallsopp.co.uk]

Hi

Just for the record, so I can throw my piece of paper away, at the
Library display we got rid of:

16 Linux for the small business
17 linux for artists/multimedia, and
19 Free as in Freedom trifolds.

That's kinda interesting, that the freedom trifolds went. I don't
think I can say they were the most popular because the other two are
aimed at specific markets, whereas the freedom one applies to
everyone.

Also, I spoke to a chap who was looking at the stand when I wanted to
dismantle it and he had the impression that Linux was faster and more
robust, and was surprised at us majoring on freedom. I got myself into
a mess over distributions trying to answer him .. my feeling is that
modern distributions contain just as many large GUI components as
Windows, require just as much hardware, and offer minor if any speed
advantages. My personal experiences are of imperfectly running
software, including software crashes, pretty much every day. I should
fix them, but they're not big enough issues. Anyway, discussing that
in the group, we all had pretty much the same opinion, that if you
want to run Linux on an old machine you'll have to know what you're
doing and choose an appropriate distribution. Other than that we
should play down speed advantages and even robustness advantages. His
view of Linux was, essentially, out of date, which is the problem ..
as Al says, people think Linux and think of a black screen with a
blinking cursor.

Anyway, 33 Open CDs were taken too, along with a handful of Ubuntus.

I think next year we should take a stand at Stave's Santa's Little
Helper fair. They made a real success at it, and I think the visitors
would be a principled lot who would be open to the idea of software
freedom. Stands cost a tenner.

That's it I think, besides saying congratulations all for a successful
stand, and thanks for everyone's input.

Cheers
J