Every conference I go to I do an unscientific, uncoordinated, laptop survey. As you might expect at a US based O’Reilly conference OSCON is totally dominated by Mac’s – and of course I’m adding to this statistic but at least mine is running Ubuntu. There have been a couple of other Linux running Mac’s and I even saw one MacBook running XP – go figure. Amongst the MacBooks black was the clear favourite (yet again validating my choice of white).
Of the non-Apple hardware IBM/Lenovo was probably the dominant manufacturer, although there was no clear winner. Unfortunately the majority of these are still running legacy operating systems. Of the linux running laptops the good news is that the majority are running Gnome, a few running old school window managers (Window Maker seemed to be the favourite), and only a very few KDE machines.
All in all there still a lot of work to spread freedom onto all the laptops of everyone in our community.
(# :: posted Jul 28, 04:59 pm in Open Source :: )
You should have seen RailsConf… there were so many Macs I got a certificate of nonconformity for brining an Ubuntu laptop:
http://flickr.com/photos/mintchaos/174358822/
— Phil Hagelberg Aug 4, 03:25 pm #
Cool – I’m going to RailsConf Europe in London next month. Hopefully they’ll do the same thing there and I can get a certificate too.
— Paul Cooper Aug 4, 03:56 pm #
Didn’t make it to OSCON this year, but I did a similar post for last years event
. It just seemed wierd that at the premier “open source” conference, most people weren’t using open source OS’s. At pycon there seemed to be a more even distribution among windows, macs, and linux. (IBM’s being the most common PC, and I’d guess ubuntu and gentoo the most common distros)
— matt harrison Aug 4, 05:46 pm #