warms my heart

it warms my heart to read first-person experiences of people moving off of proprietary systems and onto open source ones, especially when they say things like, "One of the best [Linux desktops] is KDE, which I use. It's a richly featured GUI that easily rivals Windows XP.'

easily rivals xp. we hear these kinds of things from happy users on a regular basis. this past saturday night when i went out for some post-linuxfesting karaoke with a group of lug'ers, a guy came up and commented on the fact that we were wearing "linux shirts" (nothing broadcasts "geek" quite as well as a huge tux head on a white t-shirt) and asked what we were up to. after telling him about linuxfest he expressed his dissapointment in not knowing about it. he then gushed on about how much he likes his suse/kde powered laptop. either working-class karoke bars are heavy in geek appeal or we're really making inroads.

so when i hear about how the open source desktop won't make it, i just drift off inside my head and remember all the people who kde has already succeeded for. it's only a matter of time until we spread out to the rest of the world. ;)

on an unrelated note, i'm seriously considering starting a weekly podcast thingy along with a bunch of other kde people. if it goes ahead, i'll do a 5 minute-ish audio segment ~once a week about some kde and/or free software related topic. my first thought was to do an "ask aaron" thing where people send in (hopefully on-topic) questions and i answer them (hopefully =). this way i don't have to think of topics that people would be interested in: i'm lazy like that. so if you have a question you'd like me to address, email it to me (aseigo at kde dot org) and we'll see how this whole podcast thingy goes.