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View Full Version : Have you ever met someone that knew what linux was?



Icarus_Complex
May 30th, 2010, 02:27 AM
I'm just curious because I've only meet three people this past year that knew what Linux was. (I apologize if this is a reoccurring question on the forums.)

dragos240
May 30th, 2010, 02:29 AM
Hmm.... Yeah, I have found some people.

Nick_Jinn
May 30th, 2010, 02:34 AM
I live in a college town and its pretty popular here.

Frogs Hair
May 30th, 2010, 02:34 AM
1 , my father , he asks me how Linus is doing . He seems to know a little of the history .

Flaky
May 30th, 2010, 02:38 AM
Well I'm a Schizoid and no one in my (computer-illiterate) family does, so, no.

Guitar John
May 30th, 2010, 02:38 AM
Most of the people I encounter who have heard of Linux, only think that they know what it is.

EarlGrey167
May 30th, 2010, 02:50 AM
Met at least one. Introduced others.

nerdtron
May 30th, 2010, 02:51 AM
2 teachers at college and 2 classmates.

wojox
May 30th, 2010, 02:55 AM
Of course I have.

lisati
May 30th, 2010, 02:57 AM
Occasionally: I've even had "Where did you get your [Ubuntu] t-shirt?"

kamaboko
May 30th, 2010, 02:58 AM
What's that?

bildr
May 30th, 2010, 03:03 AM
Come to think of it, I am kind of the local go to for linux weirdness, but yes the kind of know what it is, a little.

KiraLexi
May 30th, 2010, 03:06 AM
Yes. In almost any engineering, soft-dev, or IT field people know and use Linux... I think I know more people who do than don't.

Icarus_Complex
May 30th, 2010, 03:09 AM
Occasionally: I've even had "Where did you get your [Ubuntu] t-shirt?"

Haha, seriously? Only question I get when I wear my kubuntu hat is how do I pronounce it. :P

nerdtron
May 30th, 2010, 03:12 AM
Occasionally: I've even had "Where did you get your [Ubuntu] t-shirt?"

me too!

blagosphere
May 30th, 2010, 03:14 AM
Yes, and i am spreading the Linux love around my school.

Achetar
May 30th, 2010, 03:35 AM
Yup, two friends of mine have. Other than that I actually had a teacher take me to the principle for talking about ways to spread a computer virus (aka Linux)

Dayofswords
May 30th, 2010, 03:53 AM
Yup, two friends of mine have. Other than that I actually had a teacher take me to the principle for talking about ways to spread a computer virus (aka Linux)

Principle: Son, do you know why your in my office?

You: Not really.

Principle: it has come to my attention that you have been trying to spread a virus around the school.

You: Virus?!

Principle: Yes, and it will not be tolerated. This 'linux' virus may do damage to our computer systems.

You: no, no, no. you dont understand. linu...

Principle: this kind of thing will not happen in my school, understand me?

You: but linux isnt a virus, its an operating system.

Principle: i dont care what kind of malious computer thing it is. not in my school.

You: no, an operating system is like windows xp, vista and such.

Principle: what?

You: it doesnt harm your computers, it runs it. it runs computers quite well i may add.

Principle: Ahhh... uh... wel, go to your class, i have to talk to the IT department about this linux thingy.





alot of people in my classes know about linux, cuz i'm in college and thats what our classes do, software and hardware.
outside of class, no one.

TheNerdAL
May 30th, 2010, 03:55 AM
Yeah, but they said it sucked. D:<

Khakilang
May 30th, 2010, 03:57 AM
Yes, I meet people from Asus when they launch their first EeePC netbook. But they didn't explain in full detail about it. You know just all the marketing talk about their product. Make me wonder.

autonomy
May 30th, 2010, 05:26 AM
I've met one person who used Linux. A few of my teachers knew what Linux was, but I don't think any of them use it except one to teach a Linux class. I met another guy who's probably aware, but he was too high and mighty to talk to me more than five minutes the whole year or so. One of my acquaintances knows. I can't really start a LUG yet or petition a school board to switch to FOSS though. Oh and one classmate used Ubuntu, but he didn't like Rich Stallman and probably not me either.

Timmer1240
May 30th, 2010, 05:57 AM
Not many they think Im some kind of computer nerd for knowing a bout it and running it Im just an average person I think just about anybody could use ubuntu now it user friendly I think!ITS NOT THAT HARD TO LEARN if you want to!

2cute4u
May 30th, 2010, 06:00 AM
Is this thread a joke???

I have a hard time believing that theres anywhere in the world that most people never heard of Linux. Next thing you'll be telling me, that you don't know anyone who knows what Google is.

nmccrina
May 30th, 2010, 06:53 AM
Is this thread a joke???

I have a hard time believing that theres anywhere in the world that most people never heard of Linux. Next thing you'll be telling me, that you don't know anyone who knows what Google is.

Try living in rural Georgia (i.e. Redneck HQ [I just invented that term today after seeing the preview for the upcoming Cats and Dogs movie which looks absolutely horrid but mentions Dog HQ])! I doubt that computers are anything more than Facebook machines to 99% of the population around here, alas.

lostinxlation
May 30th, 2010, 07:08 AM
Everyone knows UNIX in San Jose area, let alone Linux.

kaldor
May 30th, 2010, 07:23 AM
Verrrry few.

-My girlfriend, but only because her brother was a RedHat freak in the 90's when she was young.

-The guy who was at the counter when buying my laptop, though I don't count him because he worked at a computer store.

-One guy saw Linux running on my computer at school a year ago and asked how I "got the disc to work".. never did figure out what he meant by that, he seemed like a computer illiterate because he couldn't explain himself beyond what I quoted.


Where I live, pretty much everything is Microsoft dominated. Some people around here didn't even know that anything besides Windows existed ("what's a Mac?"). Rural Canada.

Hman242
May 30th, 2010, 07:25 AM
Only one, my friend Daniel.

Try living in rural Georgia (i.e. Redneck HQ [I just invented that term today after seeing the preview for the upcoming Cats and Dogs movie which looks absolutely horrid but mentions Dog HQ])! I doubt that computers are anything more than Facebook machines to 99% of the population around here, alas.
That's where I live too.

AcidMoon
May 30th, 2010, 07:31 AM
I've enjoyed meeting a few around work! Unfortunately I'm normally confused in 5 minutes with all the hyper-technical talk, which does seem to be a bit of an linux-thing! I mean I never hear people talking about their new Windows 7 laptop and how they've been through services.msc over the weekend and disabled ...

Guitar John
May 30th, 2010, 07:46 AM
alot of people in my classes know about linux, cuz i'm in college and thats what our classes do, software and hardware.
outside of class, no one.


But apparently not capitalization, spelling, or grammar?

Shibblet
May 30th, 2010, 07:56 AM
I heard a barista ask a customer in line what is flavor was, and he responded with Ubuntu. The barista said, mine's Suse, but what kind of coffee do you want.

That was kind of amusing.

Legendary_Bibo
May 30th, 2010, 08:13 AM
Nope except my brother and dad.

slooksterpsv
May 30th, 2010, 08:21 AM
In High School, there was one person that just always used Linux, he didn't have Windows or Mac, he only used Linux. At where I work, there's like 4 of us that are always conversing about the best Distro, 2 people say Slackware, I say Ubuntu, and the other is undecided.

--Slackware, granted it's very configurable, I like to configure on my own time, not during install, not after when something isn't working, I want it to work when I first install, if I break it, I'll fix it - I may learn more about Slackware, see how it works with my Hardware, but Ubuntu is still #1

NightwishFan
May 30th, 2010, 08:24 AM
Not really, no.

Rodney9
May 30th, 2010, 08:58 AM
No.

ctrlmd
May 30th, 2010, 09:05 AM
yes a lot of people.

goldshirt9
May 30th, 2010, 09:18 AM
one person at my work who used a long time ago and never touches it any more.
he was shocked at how the new lynx looked and felt when he saw my laptop.
he was impressed.
one maintenance guy who swore by it and has helped me out now and again.

funny though or scary our IT chappie has never even heard of linux :evil:

blueturtl
May 30th, 2010, 09:19 AM
Oh I've found a few people who think they know what Linux is. :)

(It's that system that's well suited to servers and clusters but not really for personal use.)

NCLI
May 30th, 2010, 09:34 AM
A few here and there. Not many though.

alket
May 30th, 2010, 10:29 AM
In beginning of 2010 I even found people who use Ubuntu too, now I know about 15 people who use Ubuntu, at first it came as a shock for me because I always thought that I'm the only albanian in Kosovo who uses ubuntu, lol.

murderslastcrow
May 30th, 2010, 10:31 AM
Yeah, but they were mostly geeks who were way too into it.

I don't mean knowledgeable, okay? I mean, I know plenty more than the average user, but that's just because I toy around every month or so because I want a new feature. These guys are all into using only open source drivers when company-provided ones are available, playing only Linux games, never using Wine... you know, not even FOSS guys, since they don't seem to care that much about the philosophical and political aspect of free software. They're just alpha geeks, and ironically enough I end up helping them with hardware issues.

But actually, a few people in my community have been using openSUSE for a while, and a few Ubuntu users before I discovered it. After I discovered it, quite a few of my friends ended up wanting it and either dual-booted or fully installed it. Since I'm a fairly social person and like to share information with interested people, I end up educating people on Linux almost on accident when they bring up my desktop, their virus problems, etc. Just to let them know there are options.

And most people want a way out when they get a big issue like that. So yes, I know tons of Linux users, many of which are due to my introductions, but I would hope they could have found it otherwise.

Dalek Draco ON LINUX
May 30th, 2010, 10:47 AM
Surprisingly I know quite a few people that know/use linux. A guy I work with had to use linux as part of his computer course at college. A guy at uni converted to ubuntu after I'd posted on facebook saying how amazing it was, and another guy is in the process of setting up a dual-boot with windows xp after I told him about t. So I guess technically one person and the others were all converted :P.

Random_Dude
May 30th, 2010, 10:51 AM
A lot of the people I know have heard of it, but almost none uses it. Besides me, just one or two people run linux (Ubuntu) on a more or less regular basis.

Nick_Jinn
May 30th, 2010, 02:39 PM
Some people need to get off their computer and get out more....maybe get a mobile device so you can at least surf at a cafe or something.

Frogs Hair
May 30th, 2010, 03:12 PM
I failed to mention in my first post that have introduced four people to Ubuntu and they use 9.10 Wubi installations. They didn't know what it was until they saw me using it.

At one job I used Unix to run the in-circuit test fixtures , but the way it was setup made it look like DOS.

autonomy
May 30th, 2010, 05:02 PM
Try living in rural Georgia
That's where I live too.
Are either of you going to SELF (http://www.southeastlinuxfest.org/)?

Get out more, get a mobile device and surf at a cafe or something.
Yep, maybe I'll get one, soon, and do that.

RiceMonster
May 30th, 2010, 05:15 PM
Lots. People I work with, people from college, family members, friends, etc.

gletob
May 30th, 2010, 05:41 PM
2 Teachers
3 of my peers
1 stranger wearing an Ubuntu shirt on the D.C. Metro

And I converted 3 family members

swoll1980
May 30th, 2010, 05:58 PM
Most of the people I encounter who have heard of Linux, only think that they know what it is.

This is on par with my experiences. The one person I've met that truly knows about Linux, is my IT Teacher. He's an old Unix guy that worked for bell labs.

ssj6akshat
May 30th, 2010, 06:01 PM
The old guy next door is a UNIX guy!He worked at Indian Railways(No surprise after hearing that)

Guitar John
May 30th, 2010, 06:18 PM
A friend of mine who used UNIX years ago, and currently writes code for a company with a National Defense contract, uses a Mac at home. When I started out using Ubuntu back in 2006, his reaction was "Linux? YIKES!!"

autonomy
May 30th, 2010, 07:01 PM
A friend of mine ... uses a Mac at home. When I started out using Ubuntu back in 2006, his reaction was "Linux? YIKES!!"
Yeah, although OS X is kind of like Steve Jobs' personal UNIX flavor that's tailored to the hardware, Linux is GNU, not UNIX, so how could it be trusted? It's unregulated, built on the peripheral by hacker coders, etc.

DouglasAWh
May 30th, 2010, 07:21 PM
I'm assuming you mean other than at work or at LUG meetings? I formerly lived in the Raleigh area, where Red Hat is based, so people definitely knew about it. My brother uses Ubuntu sometimes. I wish he'd get more involved, but whatever. I work at a ~3500 employee software development company so tons of people here know what Linux is.

I can't recall striking up a conversation with any random people on the street, but it's not like I do that often anyway.

magmon
May 31st, 2010, 08:15 AM
Actually, a few weeks ago, I was pleasantly suprized when a rather cute girl, who I had spoken to before but don't know all too well, asked if I use linux when she saw the ubuntu sticker that sat proudly on my spanish binder. Apparently her father is setting up a company that sells branded T shirts, and donates the money made to non-profit linux related companies.

mbzn
May 31st, 2010, 10:15 AM
To be honest, about 95% of the people i know that realized i dont use ******* asked "what do you use?" i then reply with "linux" and they look at my funny and say "I've heard of it"... (in the sense that they dont know what it is)

I live in the country Ubuntu, or rather Mark was borne

carl_pr
May 31st, 2010, 08:26 PM
I study computer science, this semester i was taking a operating system class. Is sad that around here so many computer students at this level don't even try Linux, the professor asked who try Linux and i am very shy so i didn't answer but another guy pointed at me and said i always see him with Linux on his netbook. I was the only one that used Linux in the room, the class was very easy since i knew lot of basic stuff about Linux and the rest were having a bad time with exams lol.

init1
May 31st, 2010, 08:28 PM
Yeah, about 4 or 5 people. Not all of them use it much though, but they at least know it exists.