[GLLUG] GLLUG still alive?

[Damion Yates]

On Tue, 13 Aug 2024, Polarian via GLLUG wrote:

> By the time I wrote this email, many relies flooded in, so I will 
> answer all of them in this email.

It was so busy I was put off replying as I tried to keep up before I 
could speak up myself!
I was very pleased to see all the in-line responses but I'd not bothered 
fixing my alpine to use xoauth2 on my consumer gmail.com.  I usually fwd 
these emails to my work address where alpine is working, but can't reply 
to the list from there.

(I've [snipped] various chunks in my response)

> John:
>
>> I think the main problem is that Linux has both become mainstream 
>> enough that help is available through many other channels, and also 
>> complex/fragmented enough that a general Linux mailing list may not 
>> be the best place to get help.
> 
> I believe this is still untrue.

I completely agree.  Sure, it's everywhere, e.g. Android, routers, 
almost all serving infrastructure and HPC.  But it definitely isn't 
mainstream and most people haven't heard of it despite it being around 
over 30 years.

I grew increasingly upset through the day when I heard about 
Cloudstrike, especially with significant press coverage through that day 
proving how critical MS are.  Obviously almost nobody where I work was 
affected (mostly linux with >200k people not using windows).  I didn't 
know until I saw it mentioned in the news.  After this I saw the true 
extent of continued growth of Windows.  I hadn't realised airports or 
banks were now critically dependant on it.  This feels new to me.  Then 
there is the British Library 
https://www.bl.uk/home/british-library-cyber-incident-review-8-march-2024.pdf 
this write-up reminds me of the mentality of the 1990s and initial 
2000s.  I had hoped that mentality had stopped and I'm pretty certain 
banks and airports were on bespoke highly robust systems, not that 
they'd been sold a solution from MS in the past decade or so.


Personally if add it up, I've barely used Windows more than a few days 
in my entirely life, moving between several companies that didn't 
mandate its use, or better that were actively insistent on you using 
Linux.
I'm still hoping for the year of linux on the desktop!

I love my old X11 window manager and find it hard to cope with change 
(Wayland, systemd, hotplug, resolvers, a.out->ELF, lilo->grub, dnsmasq, 
sysv vs bsd inits...).  I cope as and so far have been able to learn the 
new ways, even if they're not as good, I still have a rc.local with a 
bunch of post boot fixups :-}  But so far I'm not hindered in using 
xterm, screen, ssh, irc, pine & vi to work and relax as I have been able 
to do since the late 1900s.  (Wayland might piss me off a lot...)

Basically I hope to move through life largely unaffected by the ups and 
downs.  For several decades things got better or worse in terms of not 
feeling like a 2nd class citizen.

Sometimes you'd see new companies supporting linux, games ported, 
drivers from the h/w companies themselves, breakthroughs in computing 
infra being linux based as a critical backend (most cloud services), 
wine and proton largely solving issues where you sadly have to run a 
.exe rather than hope somebody ported a workable solution natively.

Then you'd get Secureboot, EFI (PE executables), winmodems, winprinters, 
audio drivers, ndiswrapper+wpa_supplicant, firmware updates as a .exe, 
DRM solutions for watching films, DVD playback, new h/w utterly 
unsupported, passwd protected MRI scan cdroms*, companies deciding to 
move to Exchange but disabling IMAP.  And before I forget... Almost 
*ALL* new laptops have h/w driver issues, with only an expensive few 
letting you use all features.  Fingerprint reader, touchpad, audio, BT, 
wifi, webcam... You basically have to research and pick which laptop. 
This has got worse, not better in the past decades.

Many of these negatives get rectified, but sometimes you're in such a 
niche it's down to you, or you have to give up, buy different h/w, 
switch jobs to avoid needing Windows (or MacOS/ChromeOS).  I frequently 
encounter https://xkcd.com/979/

It's this last part that stresses me.  I've managed to get by for 
decades, but none of the core attitudes have fundamentally changed.


*****
I stand by this:

Linux is not yet mainstream for desktop/laptop use.

Worse, I now realise it's not even a given that companies who need 
fileserving/webserving infra would select it.  Cloudstrike taught me 
this recently :(
*****


There has not been an improvement in the attitude of execs in companies, 
either for users wanting to use linux, or h/w companies wanting to sell 
loads of h/w and make money.  Why bother helping a small percentage of 
users?

I fear that at any point in the future a new way of doing things, 
similar to secureboot, could cause all linux users to have to use old 
h/w or expensive h/w to get by.

I know secureboot was addressed quite quickly by volunteers and linux 
companies but these are tiny in comparison to MS.  Also MS broke it for 
many very recently.  I saw this days ago in the news and it requires 
users to have linux boot skills to fix and address this to get back into 
their (I would hope main) partition.

I'll leave my Wayland rant to another thread!  Sorry this is so verbose, 
but it's nice we have a LUG where I can vent and get this off my chest.

> You will very rarely find any Linux/FOSS enthusiasts if you pop to the 
> local boozer (I am yet to hear any techy convos :P), or even at 
> University, very few people know what Linux is at my University, and 
> only a few have started using it since they started. And this is 
> within computer science, where you would expect to find Linux users, 
> in other subjects where people who may be interested in Linux/FOSS but 
> studying say mathematics, or maybe literature, they will be even less 
> likely to bump into another Linux user.

This is sad to hear.  I went to uni in the late 1900s and it was a UNIX 
first environment in almost all universities 
(we had SG IRIX machines, most mostly Sun SPARC, with a handful of 
Linux).
There was DOS/Netware/Windows for non-tech students increasing in use 
over the 3 years I was there.  Society around me was changing, the old 
days of Mac, Amiga, ST, Archimedes as choices for companies, who were 
moving on from UNIX/CPM (some still 8bit).  Moved to basically 
*everyone* must use PCs with Windows.  Gamers with ZX Speccies, who 
might have moved to an Atari ST, etc, moved to a console (e.g. 
Playstation) or a Windows PC.

I had assumed/hoped that centres of excellence like Universities would 
have moved from legacy expensive UNIX, to free Linux, with Windows PCs 
just for non tech students writing their dissertations.

My daughter is headed off to study CompSci and I had planned on showing 
her some UNIX techy cmdline stuff before she starts, but I assume this 
is now a waste of time?


Also yes, you don't hear tech talk in pubs enough.  I used to go to 
SCLUG pub meets in Reading when I lived in the silicon corridor, but I 
can't recall *ever* going for drinks with GLLUG.

To all: I like drinking, I live and work near KX in Camden. [update, see 
the bottom of this thread]

>> That said there's still things which turn up here which don't appear 
>> anywhere else, and enough "old school" users to remember solutions to 
>> rare problems.

Actually yes this interesting.  Sadly I feel like people have moved to 
Windows/MacOS, I know old, hardened, greybeared, UNIX friends, who 
simply moved to MacOS as they tired of fixing stuff as a 2nd class 
citizen.  I found it shocking as I'm in the same camp socially but 
haven't given up yet.

(*)I put an asterisk next to my mention of password protected MRI scan 
cdrom earlier.  This took me >4hrs to eventually hack wine enough to get 
it working.  Once decrypted, I was able to use its Windows .exe to look 
at the scan, but I initiated an unencrypted export so I could use an 
open source X11 solution thereafter.

Alternatively maybe there are fewer queries for support as everything is 
better and there are fewer esoteric issues cropping up so less help is 
needed.  I'm not entirely a pessimist!  Perhaps external support/web 
searches are working better.

>> I don't know the status of the IRC channel as I never used it
>
> Shame, hanging out on IRC is fun!

I don't think I knew one for this LUG.  I suffer FOMO so tend to like to 
keep up to completion.  But I'm simply far too busy to be able to keep 
up, so I'd rather cut off my nose to spite my face and not join in the 
1st place.  At work we use IRC and it's popular.

>> there haven't in-person meetings for many years except for an 
>> occasional meet-up in a pub.
>
> I thought that was what most lug meetups were, discussing Linux and 
> FOSS stuff over a nice pint.
>
> Was there more interesting meetups? Mini hackathons? local events?

+1 on doing this.  I'm up for drinks.

> I thought it would be a good idea to investigate groups in my region 
> (London) especially how I am trying to branch out and begin to attend 
> events, finding ones close to home would be great!

Glad you reached out, nice to meet you!

> Currently I am planning to attend EuroBSDCon (I know its not Linux, 
> but its still *nix)
>
> However these are all international, and I have seen other lug's relay 
> event information within the surrounding regions, but there seems to 
> be no lug's left in/near London, and also no Linux/FOSS events around 
> here either.

A pity.

> Martin:
> 
>> Most LUGs are dying, if not already dead.  Why?  Very simple: we won. 
>>
>> Linux went from a hobbyist OS used by geeks and weirdos to global
>> ubiquity. The geeks and weirdos are still the same, though.

Er... see above.

[snipped]

>> with many keen university students as members who were able to 
>> contact package developers visiting London and persuade them to give 
>> talks on their pet subjects.
>
> And yet, Linux is still not big within universities, at least 
> non-russell group universities.
>
> My university exclusively uses Windows, apart from a few Macbooks 
> which computer science staff use (MacOS is better than Windows in 
> their eyes) but they are trying to get rid of them too.

*sobs*

[snipped nostalgic rant]

>> Mailing lists are for old people. Old people are finding "better" 
>> things to do with their time than edit 
>> /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf, like dying or spending time 
>> with the family or in the garden.
>
> Yikes... that is very negative.

Er... see above.

[snipped refreshing insight from somebody younger who is clearly old 
beyond their years with a passion for tech and linux ;)]

>

[snipped the realisation that the world lacks enough scientists and 
techies meeting up and chatting]

> Linux didn't win, in fact I would say it lost. It was adopted server 
> side, and then wrapped up in abstractions to appeal to the average 
> young person.

Yes this ^^^

> The nerdy side died, Linux didn't win, windows simply failed.  You 
> have Linux which is all about you being free to use however you like, 
> and what do the younger generation do?

> Make the most flashy eye candy desktop possible. Do you think any of 
> them care about FOSS or the *nix way of doing things? No.

TBF enlightenment was huge in the 1990s and that's exactly what you're 
describing.

I'm unsure where the deep techie discussions moved to.  I was addicted 
to Usenet news back in the day, constantly reading everything (FOMO) in 
a number of tech groups, same with various IRC channels.  To answer the 
overriding question of this thread about where that's gone, well 
personally I'm just *extremely* busy.  Look how long it took me to find 
time to reply to this.  Admittedly I work with a bunch of techies and 
scientists who do chat about techy things at lunch.  I also got married 
and had kids which eats time.  Perhaps the getting old and dying is a 
bit of a grim assumption, but having kids is a massive time sink. 
Perhaps the younger generations aren't ramping up enough into linux (or 
general tech) and this is created the void you've observed.  Apparently 
the news tells me that the younger generation isn't even drinking in 
pubs either...

I have a job where I manage a bunch of SRE/SWE experts, only some of 
whom are linux experts.  It's just not needed, things work well here. 
When you start, there are fantastic defaults for .pinerc, .vimrc and 
.bashrc for example.  I consider this a culture++ indication.

As for FOSS, well to be honest I don't care that much about the free (as 
in libre) side of Linux.  I despise arguments about BSD vs GPL vs etc...

If I felt its intentional insidious licensing nature would prevent the 
stuff I ranted about earlier happening with proprietary h/w and drivers 
not working, I might give a cr*p.  But practically nobody in the 
industry cares and it's not helping anyway.  I'm perfectly happy with 
closed source but UNIX ethos systems.  E.g. I prefer a nippy X11 system 
with proprietary nvidia drivers, over a righteous open source driver.

I'll happily discuss the pragmatic security issues over a pint.

> You only tend to find self hosting in privacy paranoid circles these 
> days. The type of people who believe that leaking one packet to the 
> government would be the end of their life.

Spot on.

>> IRC is dead(*). People tend to use Telegram, Signal, Discord, Matrix 
>> (ugh), and friends. I still chat to people I met through LUGs most 
>> days. Just not here.
>>
>> * I am in around 30 channels, they're almost all dead.
>
> Which is sad, truly sad, but that doesn't mean its the end?

+1

> IRC will never die, no matter what

It would be nice if I could attach an IRC client to the various 
replacements (WhatsApp, Discord, Slack, Google Chat, FB messenger) and I 
typically can for some of those (FB, slack & google certainly, some 
using bitlbee), but the lack of threading makes you a 2nd class citizen.

>> If you're looking for companionship or friendly banter, I'd recommend 
>> organising something, announcing where you will be and when. People 
>> nearby or willing will turn up, usually, in small numbers.
>
> I could think of nothing more scary that meeting up with a bunch of 
> strangers, especially as someone from a younger generation.

> Not to mention the fact I will have a disproportionate amount of 
> knowledge compared to the type of people who hang around lug's, it 
> would be like trying to explain rocket science to a baby.
>
> Apologies for the email being so long, I didn't want to send multiple 
> emails so I condensed it all as best I could.

Thank you so much for reaching out and starting this thread.  If it 
helps, I'm outgoing and like chatting.  I'd be up for drinks/curry in 
KX, my local curry house would treat people nicely.  Let's aim for a 
weekday after the bank holiday and ~6 people from this list, which might 
be a stretch given the entire point of this thread is about how little 
you find this happening these days.

If people +1 this (you could swamp the list or reply directly), we can 
select a date and time.  My wife *is* a linux user but I strongly 
suspect she'd prefer the night off :-}  I'll ask anyway.


  Best wishes,

   - Damion


PS I've reformatted with flowed formatting.  Almost nobody old-school 
should notice (other than those in Mutt/Pine where it's now better), but 
depending on the email client it'll allow dynamic screen widths and 
remain clean, whilst adhering to ~72 width as recommended for textual 
emails.  If you're using vim to compose you should :set fo+=aw

Also if anyone is using the old mobile gmail in a phone browser, it 
still supports flowed formatting, but they deprecated this in the new 
desktop UI about 6 years ago, sadly so did Outlook, possibly other 
clients.  I have no idea why, probably ignorance rather than 
intentionally aiming to make text email look ugly.  If anyone happens to 
want to moan at Google about this, I'm still waiting on b/77258484 (Mar 
29, 2018) to fix this.