Last week just before departing for railsconf, I gave a rather rambling seminar Ready for business: hands-on with the open source desktop. Jono had done most of the initial work (it was planned before he knew he was leaving) and I’m not sure I did his usual high standard of delivery any justice, spiralling out of control time wise and finishing an hour and half over time (apologies to those that had to leave before I finished). In case you care the slides are available – the slides in the middle which list application names are just placeholders for the demos. This is where things got out of control time wise. It’s easy to forget that there is so much functionality that it’s possible to demonstrate – especially when asked ‘Does it do X’ type questions – that it’s not sensible to allocate 3mins to each demo. Anyway the delegates seemed to like the demos and get something out of it.
I think the weakness of the presentation was that I didn’t really make the case as to why an IT company might want to use LoTD, or even open-source applications – as opposed to whatever came on the machine, and whatever they have kicking round the office. One delegate said in not so many words: “Why should I use OpenOffice when I can use my one copy of Office 2000 on any machine”. On the other hand we were trying to avoid the ‘App X is better than App Y’ type of approach and just make the point; Linux is already suitable for many kinds of ‘Business’ use, and here’s some of the highlights. Put that little seed into people minds in a non-confrontational way.
Eclipse seemed to be a big hit, and Sabayon and Pessulus really piqued the interest of many, as they were unaware of any management tools for LoTD. Plus the XGL based bling really seemed to surprise – I think the expectation was that it would be a more drab lower quality experience than they were used to, rather than something newer and more cutting edge.