Tonight I met a systems engineer for a European car company who spent 20 minutes talking my ear off about the virtues of Linux, and how much it had changed — for the better — since his college days.
He was preaching to the converted of course, but it was an agreeable experience all the same. We shared war stories, as geeks are apt to do, and parted good friends.
I also met a repair technician for NEC who uses Windows-based software primarily, but also knew Linux and seemed intrigued.
By the way, if you’re keeping score, this is the second time I’ve met another rabid Linux fan seemingly at random (meaning, outside of users groups or through company techies), and one of many countless people who’ve heard of it, and think sometimes they might be interested in it.
Make sure you get a good seat. The revolution is under way, and will not be televised.
Motho ke motho ka botho 
I know four people who run Linux because they believe it’s a better operating system (I’ve converted two of them). But then they are geeks, so I don’t know if that counts.
What really shows that a “revolution” is under way is that all computers at my school will be running Linux next year:
http://ec.europa.eu/idabc/en/document/7576/6008
This is also my feeling K.Mandla.
I was at a meeting for work a couple weeks ago, about teaching computer basics at the university and giving a certification to first year students. More than half of the universities in France are one way or the other teaching open source applications (browser, text editor, spreadsheets, mail reader etc.) and a fair amount give Linux (read ubuntu) Live CDs to the students when they register.
1- I felt part of a process, and not alone any more
2- Hopefully this will give more weight to my demands
The revolution will be going at a fast pace too.
Last week I had a similar experience. I was talking to some guy I met from an online community (he wanted to take bass guitar lessons from me) and like fifteen minutes later we ran out of stuff to talk and he said “Do you know Linux?”. I was shocked. He told me how he was trying to convince his colleagues to move everything at work computers to open source. Not only a Linux user but an open source ambassador.
You’re right, the revolution will not be televised, but I’m sensing that it will be online 🙂
My mum, girlfriend and son all run Ubuntu. My mum is computer illiterate and she has no problem with it. My girlfriend is pretty savvy she runs it on her eee pc and another laptop too. My son loves the gimp and xara xtreme, all the games, and syncs his ipod with amarok.
Oh my son is 10.
It is great for Europe as for some reason you guys tend to embrace or choose the correct path unlike us Americans who mostly tend to go with the bigger companies offering(*cough* Windoze). It is sad to say that even with our user groups, local teams and Linux conferences we still do not have good penetration here in the U.S.
My Daughters, My wife use it with no problem and most of my friends at work, So to some degree we are making some stride but to me is not enough.
But yes a revolution is coming, change is coming but will they allow it.
… and Bestbuy is helping us 😉
After having used Linux for nearly ten years, I’ve heard of this revolution for a long time. Most of the time people proclaiming it as the year of the Linux desktop.
It’s not going to happen. The desktop is changing a lot anyway. If anything Apple will become the next dominate desktop. Unless the cloud / web based systems (Google OS?) don’t take over first.
There is still a lot of hardware issues, commercial software distribution issues, and variety of distributions to deal with.
Linux will dominate many network enabled devices, geek desktops, and servers. All of this and a large majority of population will never know the name “Linux.”