I was finally in my home city of San Francisco for an Ubuntu release (why are Octobers so crazy?) so I was able to put together a small event for the release of Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander).
The night before I pulled out the nail polish and nail decals from System76 to get into the spirit of things.
At 6:30 I arrived at Panera Bread to get set up.
I brought along my pair of salamanders, one of which would be auctioned off, I also brought along a copy of the Official Ubuntu Book to give away.
In all we had 5 total attendees, which made for the smallest turnout I’ve ever had for a release party, but made for a great number for conversation. I was able to show off the features of the new Smart Scopes in Unity on my laptop and verbally share some updates from the world of Xubuntu. We also got to learn about some of the latest improvements in MoinMoin from a developer who joined us and about some of the other recent projects being worked on by attendees.
It was also great to see interest in the Ubuntu Phone from a couple of folks who happened to be having coffee nearby. They asked us about the progress of the Ubuntu Phone codebase (released today!) and we commiserated over the inability of Ubuntu Edge to reach the funding goal.
For 14.04 we hope to do something bigger, we’re seeking to partner with one of the many businesses in the area tat use Ubuntu to do more hands on demos and more formal demonstration of the new features. Stay tuned for updates on that coming in the spring.
Saturday, Oct 19th, 2013 at 3:16
It saddens me to hear about the weak turnout. Seems like folks either just don’t care about Linux at the desktop level or they’re still ignorant that it exists. I hope it doesn’t have anything to do with the failure of the Edge campaign!
Here’s hoping the tech industry will buzz about 14.04!
Sunday, Oct 20th, 2013 at 12:38
At least in San Francisco, this isn’t the conclusion I have drawn from the turnout. Truth is, anywhere you go here you see Ubuntu being used. Companies on servers and lap/desktops, coffee shops, bars, I went to a show at a theater last night and a guy in the front row had an Ubuntu laptop. It’s everywhere.
So instead I see it as people just not getting as grass-roots excited about it here as much. It’s an effective tool in their day to day life, they may not be strictly passionate about open source, at least not enough to spend an evening with those who do. It’s sad in some ways, but in others it means success, and that’s exciting.
Thursday are also extremely event-heavy here. I skipped an OpenStack meetup and (very disappointedly!) a BayLISA meetup in the city to attend this release party. If I hadn’t been so involved with Ubuntu I think I would have gone to the BayLISA event. In addition to event overlap, we have tons of tech events and people need to select wisely, a casual release party may not fit the bill for a lot of people. I also could have done much better at spreading the word about it, with my travel schedule lately I didn’t carve out much time to spend on it so it really only went to the Ubuntu mailing list and my own social media, not one of the many other places I routinely post it to.
For the LTS release in the spring I plan to be more organized. Bigger event, real space and activities and much better marketing for it :)
Saturday, Oct 19th, 2013 at 10:00
This looks so totally awesome! Wish I were in San Francisco then (I visit there a lot, but live in Vancouver — and I had wondered if there was a LoCo in SF). I would have totally come to this! I’m now just waiting for the release party in Vancouver :-)