[vox] LUGOD meeting attendance and new-user signups

[Norm Matloff]

On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 02:22:55PM -0800, Alex Mandel wrote:

> I discussed this with the CS club officers last year. Anecdotally they
> seemed to think that bad experiences with the "Dungeon" computers turned
> off students from wanting to use Linux and going home to use their
> windows machines. Some of it revolved around the machines having
> outdated libraries for some people's coding projects. Not sure what the
> other reasons are.

The "dungeon" is indeed a dismal place, but that shouldn't reflect on
Linux.  They students would hate the dungeon even if it were running
Windows.

As to "outdated libraries," that doesn't sound accurate to me.  There
was one faculty member who insisted on using a special version of Java
at one point, which meant that there were two or three versions on the
systems at once and caused confusion, but to my knowledge that's the
closest it has come to that.  Could be something I'm not aware of, but
not common in any case.

Instead, I think the problem is mainly the negative, in the form of very
overt pro-Windows attitudes of one or two faculty, and the lack of the
positive, i.e. lack of saying things like, "If you want to work at
Google, you need to become a Linux guru now, using it in all your
computer work."

Norm