FSFE supporters Vienna

Audience

It is surprising that each year the Veganmania summer festival seems to get bigger. Every time it is breaking records on how many people are visiting. This year it of course helped that the weather was perfect. While it was horribly hot in the summer the autumn weekend from Friday to Sunday September 20 was dry, comfortably warm and only on the last day we occasionally had strong wind so that some stickers and leaflets flew away and that we needed to hold the roof of our tent down at times despite having a heavy weight on each tent leg. These conditions gave us good opportunities to have productive discussions about independence on electronical devices.

Once more it proofed right to chose this event for our information desk. While we did have some recurring visitors from previous years and others who already know about the advantages of free software we mostly did reach people to whom the concept of software freedom was a new idea.

It seems interesting to me that so many people are actually willing to come closer to an information desk that is obviously about computers when most of them experience computers as a necessity they don’t want to engage with more than they need to. Especially when they are browsing over things that they are actually interested in. After all, those people came to the Veganmania summer festival because they wanted to discover new vegan products and possibly have a meal there.

Many were surprised to learn how free software could help them to get more years out of their old hardware since they can potentially avoid the need to buy new computers when they upgrade to a free operating system instead of limiting them selves to sticking with a solution that forces them to abandon hardware that works perfectly fine only to get annoyed by forced advertisements and anti-features like AI surveillance they can’t completely get rid of when carrying on using their proprietary operating systems in return.

Topics

Many people did hear for the first time that there is a way out of this that doesn’t even cost them as much money and nerves as staying with their old solution would. Of course some where anxious about the idea of switching to something unfamiliar but we could answer that with our local support offerings. Thanks to our newest activist we could not only offer our personal help and usual link to freie.it for finding locally available knowledgable people willing to help out but also information on regular meetings like Linux Café on every first Friday and “weg from big tech” (away from big tech) day every first Sunday, both held in our local hacker space Metalab. Even more our new activist also took it on to revive our local group meetings planned to happen every quarter. The next is scheduled for October second. All those dates can be found in the public online Metalab calendar.

Improvements

Also I finally was able to actually install the extended sun roof on our great new tent which proved even more useful than anticipated since it also gave us a solid bar in the middle over the information desk where we could place a light for the evening. I was surprised how early it got dark and from about seven to nine pm we had at least on the second day a very simple solution for that: The other stands used a power outlet with some big LED lights that were impressive but in my view almost to bright.

I have an old mobile phone I stopped using when Austria switched off the 3G cell phone network because it doesn’t support 4G. People couldn’t understand me on the phone any longer when it was defaulting to the even older but still supported 2G network. I decided to charge it up again in order to use its flash light as a convenient light source that doesn’t need a power outlet. And it worked flawlessly. I was very pleased with this solution and despite it being so simple and obvious I felt like a true hacker for thinking of it. It fitted well with our theme of using hardware for longer in order to protect the environment and to not waste anything.

In addition to our already proven information material for this specific non-technical audience we also added a new leaflet on open standards and with information on where people can buy hardware which is pre-selected for components that work well with free software without depending on proprietary drivers. The very kind owner of the Vikings shop reminded me about MNT Reform who had a crowd funding campaign for a rather thick and strangely looking laptop a few years back. I was interested but this not very pretty device with its large track ball wasn’t something I wanted to get. But this small initiative in Berlin hasn’t stopped and now they have even more hardware on offer that isn’t cheap but even better for people wanting to tinker with their devices than frame.work. The new MNT Reform Next has a much more streamlined striking design and a very high value case that might even appeal to people who usually buy Apple products for their design.

We also updated our GNU/Linux distribution overview leaflet. Since we can only list ten out of hundreds it is always a tough decision which to include. So we aim to not just cover the most popular distros but also examples for a wide range of needs. On the back side of it we added an introduction to the most common desktop environments because having wildly different choices of user interfaces isn’t something people coming from proprietary operating systems are used to. This time we did still use the black and white leaflets on colour paper we could print in a copy shop because we unfortunately didn’t get the professionally printed colourful versions in time.

Challenges

Already bringing the whole material to the festival was challenging not only because the cargo bike was very full when including the new tent and the obligatory fire extinguisher but also because I forgot to check if the battery was full. And of course it was exhausted a few meters before I needed to go over an incline. The second steep piece of my way I tried to wheel the bike and was surprised that this was actually easier than pedalling in the lowest gear.

Unfortunately, I was to slow to work out how we might provide USB drives using Ventoy in a way that it wouldn’t be to expensive to hand out already prepared installation media for a couple of distributions so that interested people could just comfortably use them instead of needing to overcome the hurdle to hunt down installation media and the proper software to create them. Of course it would also be great to have a leaflet with it so that it describes how they might overcome hurdles like Secureboot or adjusting the boot order. I imagine a thick paper a USB device is pinned onto so that it always comes as a practical combo. We did have a solution for this in the past with installation DVDs we did hand out but unfortunately nowadays hardly any computer still includes a DVD drive. In essence, there is still room for improvement.

Conclusion

As usual, manning this information stand for three days was demanding but also fulfilling and hopefully something that showed at least a few people a way out of their proprietary cages. I am very grateful not only to the other volunteers helping out but also to the Veganmania team since we so far did always get a spot despite having a subject that hardly anyone would expect at such an event.