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 :)

Here’s hoping the tech industry will buzz about 14.04!