Linux Day 2019 - Italy
On October 26, like every year since 2001, it was held the Linux Day. The Linux Day is an Italian event promoted by the Italian Linux Society and locally organized by many LUGs and associations in a lot of cities all around the country. It could be considered the main Italian FLOSS event organized by non commercial entities, and community driven by many passionate volunteers. The fact that it is held in many cities instead of organizing a big event in a single place, it is a way to facilitate the approach of people to local Linux/FLOSS communities, then also many students, people with limited time and resources and also just merely curious citizens have the possibility to get in touch with the FLOSS universe and know people that animate such place. Sadly, in the last years we are looking to a slow decrease of cities where Linux Day events are organized. Last year there were 77 events, while this year they were 58. Unfortunately this is perfectly in line with the current status of many FLOSS communities: it is so hard to find new passionate contributors. There are some proposals to change the style of the Linux Day, and transform it in many regional events in order to join forces and ideas where needed. We will see how it will go.
This year there were Fedora representatives in four cities: Bari, Ivrea and Pisa. Linux Day in Catania was postponed due to a weather alert (it will be held in mid-November) that was disastrous in some places of Sicily. In Ivrea there was a talk hosted by dariolesca. In Bari there was a talk (and much more!) hosted by corsaro. In Pisa there was a booth managed by alciregi.
Some words from Pisa: the Linux Day was organized by GULP (LUG of Pisa) in collaboration with GDG Pisa and L.U.Ma.Ca. (LUG of Massa Carrara). It was held in the Engineering Department of the University, and as always the attendees were mainly university students and professors. There were at least a hundred people. Talking with the organizers the impression is that, compared to some years ago, the main interests of the attendees as well as hosts is no more the operating system, but applications (in the sense of what you can do with a computer and in the sense of software applications). So Linux distributions loose interest (between high school and university students), and what seems to count nowadays are what you can phisically do with a system (Raspberry Pi projects, Arduino and makers world, 3D printing, etc.) and software applications. Indeed you can find the same open source application (many of them are web applications) or you can achieve what you want (from development to entertainment) on Linux as well on other platforms (mainly mobile systems). Who care about the platform? And after all any modern Linux distribution just works, as well as others systems, and the main reason to convince someone to install Linux in place of the pre-installed system could be some ethical motivation. Fun fact: at the booth, a youth refused to get a Fedora pin because he didn’t want to risk that his non technical friends ask him why he had the logo of [a very popular social network] on his backpack. I never thought this would really happen. I thought it was more a urban myth :-)
Some words from Ivrea: ……………..
Some words from Bari: in Bari the Linux Day was so an unexpected an exciting success, that we have decided to write a dedicated report you can find here: ---LINK---