Review: Back from CLT 2017

It’s almost a week since the Chemnitzer Linux days: time for a brief review (link in German):

To make a long story short: This meeting was a big success.

Alfred and I arrived on Friday evening and went to check out the location. The slogan “Barrieren einreißen” (engl: “tear down barriers”) couldn’t have been chosen better. To get there by the shortest route you had to tear down many barriers, since it seems that Chemnitz is a single big construction site. So it took us a while to find the best alternative route. 

When we arrived, we were warmly welcomed by the organisation team and had our first discussion, about the relation between the number of free projects and the number of companies, and the danger of sponsoring of this kind of event by big companies. On the other hand the free projects benefit from the lower costs, the preparation of the booth (incl free printing of a poster) and two days of free catering.

sdr

On Saturday morning, after Jürgen and Frank‘s arrival to complete our booth attendance, we were a little bit afraid that our booth wouldn’t get enough attention, because it was located in a corner. It turned out to be not the case: we were getting in contact with a lot of different people and there was enough time for various discussions about our project. Also our presentation of the upcoming Mageia 6 raised a lot of interest. We had a lot of giveaways, too, like pens, stickers, cups, t-shirts and USB sticks (which we exchanged for a small donation) and also the swiss cookies attracted visitors and booth attendants the same way. Because there were 4 of us, there was also some time for visiting talks and getting in contact with other projects around us.

On Saturday evening there was (as every year) the big dinner for staff and booth attendants with plenty of food and drink. And even there we had some very interesting and informative discussions with people from other projects or associations (a special regards to Christoph from LUG Frankfurt (Link in German), if he’s reading this). 

It felt like the Sunday was not as busy (many of the visitors already visited the booth on Saturday), but anyway the booth of Mageia still attracted many other visitors. There were some who complimented Mageia as the only distribution to get their WIFI to work or others who are using this distribution and the ancestors since Mandrake times. However there are still some people around who had never heard about Mageia, even though it has already existed for around 7 years and released 5 great versions. So this should lead us to increase our marketing as we did with this presence at the CLT.

Finally we want to  say a big “Thank you” to the organisation team of CLT 2017 for giving us the opportunity to present Mageia there. In exchange for the printing of a second poster we donated 20€ to the penguins of the animal park in Limbach-Oberfrohna, who are adopted by the CLT (link in German / Video in German).

https://twitter.com/tocopaxi/status/841045726343892992

Danke auch Euch fürs Dagewesensein!

— Chemnitzer Linux-Tage (@clt_news) March 15, 2017

We are looking forward to presenting at CLT 2018 as well.