I know people who always manage to get in on things before they get big. You know, those people who loved Alanis Morissette before Jagged Little Pill went multi-platinum. They had iPods before iPods were household words. Right now I’m reading a book called Why White Kids Love Hip Hop: Wangstas, Wiggers, Wannabes, and the New Reality of Race in America by Bakari Kitwana, wherein Kitwana discusses how white kids who got into hip hop in the 80s were early adopters and pretty serious about hip hop culture. I’ve never really felt that before. I’m not really a trendsetter. For most things—consumer-wise, anyway—I just follow the crowd.
I guess that’s why I blog about Ubuntu and am excited that I use Ubuntu. Desktop Linux (I don’t know if the big thing will be Ubuntu, but it’s looking that way) is on its way up. There may not be a “year of the Linux desktop,” but things are happening (even three years ago, I didn’t feel I could use Linux for my everyday needs; now I’m actually an advocate of Linux), and it’s exciting to be with something when it was just beginning to take full swing. Of course, I’m not like those “elite” Linux users who were using Linux before KDE and Gnome existed. But I still think it’s exciting to be part of this quickly growing phenomenon. Every day there are more Ubuntu users signing up for the forums, asking for help. Of course, some of them give up very shortly afterwards, but many stay and are grateful for the help.
I just hope I won’t be as annoying as those Morissette fans: “Oh, I remember the good old days before everyone and her brother was using Ubuntu. People thought you had to be a geek or a computer programmer to use Ubuntu in those days. You couldn’t even preview an image when you were uploading files using Firefox. Yeah, then Ubuntu got big and the masses have ruined it. It’s not ‘pure’ any more.”
I’m like that as well, although I’ve predicted a few trends already. In any case, I don’t care about Ubuntu becoming big. If I wanted to feel special by using an obscure OS, I’d switch to other distro, BSD, or Sun’s “Project Indiana” GNU/Solaris distro.
I agree with Alejandro above, but of course while others are listening away at their favorite OGG’s, or watching their favorite Vorbis files (We can all hope ;), I see myself in the background still developing something to make Linux easier, just for the heck of it.
And as above, I’d probably go with BSD, or Soloris.
It’s weird, I’m the other way around. I used firefox back when sites didn’t know what it was, and I started using Ubuntu (well, Kubuntu :)) right before the last “Ubuntu boom” that began during dapper. I also asked my parents to reserve a Wii before people even knew what it was, but they didn’t, and they couldn’t find one when Christmas rolled around.
I haven’t predicted trends like you link141, but I have my eye on a few small projects (some not so small) that aren’t yet popular, but I like them so much and they have a great fan base, so I hope they’ll get bigger.
Thanks for your work supporting Ubuntu. I have only recently started to appreciate the strength of the Ubuntu community — it’s way beyond the community I’ve seen behind any other distro.
By the way, several of your tutorials seem very good. Is there a license associated with them, or will they only be available from this site?
thanks,
dave
http://daveshields.wordpress.com
Meow,
A suggestion that would make it easier to help visitors such as myself locate you older blog posts — when you are logged in, go to Presentation and then to Widgets, and drag Archives and Calendar from the Available section over to Sidebar Arrangement, and then select Save Changes.
Thanks for the suggestion, daveshields. I’ve put a bunch of widgets over on the sidebar. Hope that helps!
The Psychocats tutorials aren’t officially registered with Creative Commons, but unofficially I’d say the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike comes closest to how I’d like to license them. Several members of the Ubuntu community have already asked to translate Psychocats to other languages, and I’ve let them know I’m excited about seeing the tutorials available in different languages.
My blog entries are not released under an open license, however (I kind of think of them as my thoughts).
Cat,
As the author you own the copyright, so you get to decide how to license your work. You don’t have to register with Creative Commons. You just have to say what license (if any) you wish to use; you can find instructions at the CC web site on how to do so.
Thanks for adding the site bar items. Not I — and others — can easily find your earlier posts.
keep up the good work,
dave