I personally don’t mind all these easy and low ways of getting attention.
But now the discussion has appeared as a burden inside our Ubuntu-be LUG as well.

We have this policy that you can talk French, Dutch, German and English as you please.
As a (logical) result, most of the communication has been done in English.
By doing so, we can reach most of the users.
If someone sends a mail to the mailing in one of the three other languages, no one bothers.
But the pool of people that understands the message is significantly lower.

In the mailing list this has now been discussed as a problem.
There was a reaction from someone on our mailing list:

1. Het consequente gebruik van het Engels. Dit is België, en hier zijn 3 officiële landstalen: Nederlands, Frans en Duits.
Het gebruik van het Engels is dan ook compleet belachelijk, temeer daar een grote meerderheid niet eens deftig Engels kan schrijven (ja, ik ben een taalpurist).
Ben je niet tweetalig? Of zitten er mensen op de lijst die niet tweetalig zijn?
Begrijpelijk, maar dat brengt me meteen bij punt 2.

2. Ubuntu-be: waarom niet opsplitsen in een Ubuntu-vla en een Ubuntu-wal (bijvoorbeeld).
Zo het sowieso veel makkelijker maken, aangezien Vlaanderen en Wallonië (o.a.) qua bedrijfscultuur totaal verschillend zijn (ik heb in beide landsdelen gewerkt).

Now let me try to translate this to English:

1. The consequent use of English.
This is Belgium, and there are 3 official languages: Dutch, French and German.
The use of English is thus complete ridiculous. Even more because a larger group of people can't even write decent English. (Yes, I'm a language purist)
Aren't you bilingual? Or are there people on the list that are not?
I can understand, but that brings me immediately at point 2.

2. Ubuntu-be: Why not split into Ubuntu-vla and Ubuntu-wal as an example)?
This would facilitate things, as Flanders (vla) and Walons (wal) , to name something, have totally different company/business cultures. (I worked in both parts of the country)

So I started thinking about this and got to the conclusion: “Should we even care?”
For what I’m concerned, things are fine like they are.
That seemed to be the same conclusion as someone else who replied:

Also, considering that we barely have enough volunteers now, how do you
expect us to have enough volunteers if we split up in 4 or more
different groups?

To give one point-of-reference: Jean, who's been coordinating most of
the computer fair booths recently, is French-speaking natively, but
living in Flanders (and he speaks Dutch very well!).  Why would we want
him to limit his work to Flanders, and not Wallonia or Brussels?

He nailed it!
Why are grownups even discussing such a trivial thing?
In Belgium, we all learned English and French, so I can’t see a difficulty in a multilingual community.
Au contraire, this could be a positive point as our work will be more useful to other LUG’s.

But perhaps I’m wrong.
I wonder if there are other LUG’s out there that have the same problem?
Do people in Quebec have issues with this? Do people from the middle-east have issues like this? (they have a lot of dialects)
It would be nice get the opinion or the results from similar problems inside Ubuntu/Linux LUG’s.

If you never have heard of Belgium before, this is it:

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Let’s go on a journey with someone eager to start using Linux (without a live cd).

Let’s say this is one of the wonderfull people informing themselves before they actually start doing something.
Then this user would trigger a search query on his favorite search engine for the value Linux.
Linux.org is probably the first link that will be hit, as the first result has a 42% chance of getting selected.

On Linux.org he/she’ll be learning a little on the principles of linux and the GNU licence.
After a bit of reading, she’ll know how wonderful linux is and appreciate the idea of openness.

As our imaginary person has a simple old spare computer that can be used to testdrive linux, he/she is convinced and ready to download her own copy.
But there is the first problem: Which linux distribution?

On the linux.org page, there are currently 220 listed distro’s to choose from.
So now he/she can start reading all 220 items, but that’s just not done.
The most probable way to get around the pile of different distro’s, will be asking around witch one is the “best one” to use.

After some garbage talk that start with “You should use…” and ends with a discussion bestween some people fighting around to convince eachother that their distro is better, someone will probably point out to the ditsrowatch pages.
In the best case, our user will pick one of the 10 distro’s listed there as the major distributions.

Ok now, this was one of the most idealistic ways for a user to find his/her first linux distribution.

But this is not the end of our journey…

The user will most likely switch distro after time, as the grass is always greener on the other side
In the end, after already having used different distro’s the user will most probably start filtering his choises on package management system.
Then there are the most common choices I didn’t even mention such as: Window Manager, Proprietary codecs, standard apps, …

This is quite a more complex way of choosing your distribution compared to the situation where you’re standing in a shop and having 3 options.

A problem you say?

Whether this is a linux problem or not, depends on the individual user.
This long process of learning and filtering was one of the things that got me interested in linux in the first place.

But if I think about the masses, I guess this is one big draw-back for linux if you compare it against Microsoft Windows or in particular Apple’s.

There is this Paradox of choices – Why more is less speach by Barry Schwartz that will convince you of this.

The Live CD’s from Ubuntu can solve this problem a little bit.
Just by giving people a live cd, with only one version/OS, they will be limited by the direct choices they have.
Thus rendering their mood to become more statisfied.
If someone asks you to give them a Linux distribution, it’s most likely for them to use one if you give them only 1 instead of 220 listed on a page, ready to be downloaded (even for free).

Conclusion

Yes the wide range of different linux versions are a drawback for Linux. And in my opinion, keeping the masses of adopting it.