[Linux-aus] Candidacy support statement - President

[Mark Foster]

On 11/01/2016 3:40 p.m., Anthony Towns wrote:
>> On 10/01/2016 17:29, Anthony Towns wrote:
>> * My work laptop is a Mac which runs OSX natively and a mixture of FOSS and
>> proprietary software to do various day to day duties on top
>> ** VMs of Ubuntu for desktop Linux needs and devstack tweaking
> What desktop Linux needs do you have that you can't (or prefer not to)
> run natively on OS X? I got the impression most free things were available
> for OS X, though the updaters weren't as convenient as Debian or Fedora.

Are we seriously at the stage where we're challenging people who're 
putting their hands up to take a not-insigificant role in LA, because 
they use a mixed-software-stack for a variety of reasons?

I've been a big contributor to the Linux world in NZ for >15 years, but 
I spend an awful lot of time in Linux (and infact, for various reasons, 
I don't have a 'current' Linux workstation right now, though I still 
have several servers). Do I need to resign from Linux Australia now? Or 
at that level am I only worthy of being a 'member'?

I officially joined LA in order to serve on the core team for LCA2015 
(Auckland); I volunteered a hellovalot of my time and energy into what I 
believe was a very successful LCA.
I did an awful lot of the planning work for LCA on my (work COE issue) 
Windows workstation, and using my (work COE issue) Apple iPhone.
I continue to administer the NZ Linux Users Group and participate in 
groups such as the New Zealand Open Source Society on predominantly 
Windows machines.
None of these things seemed to matter to the outcome of the event.

>> Music applications, particularly virtual instruments are very compute and
>> memory intensive so virtualisation (OSX under Linux as it would have been)
>> is a non-starter.
> Hmm, compute-intensive seems surprising; I would've thought the constraint
> was latency for device access (speakers, mic, midi etc). Isn't compute
> under VM basically just a few percent worse than native these days? (Well,
> running OS X under a VM seems to be frowned upon by Apple too from what
> I can tell)
>

Play the ball, not the man.  The guy seems to have excellent pedigree in 
terms of the Linux and Open Source worlds and has accepted nomination 
into a challenging and time-consuming volunteer role.

Standing for office is so, so much more than splitting hairs and 
interrogating over details like this.

Mark.