Favorite Tech Communities?

Since bad voltage is all about community, community, community, and has a bit of a different bent to most tech communities (community!) I thought I’d start a discussion about our favorite tech communities. Might be enlightening to see which groups have been influential.

Here are mine:

  1. alt.sysadmin.recovery

If you haven’t read the archives of this, you should. They are hilarious. No one kevetches like sysadmins do, and the old usenet group has some classic rants. People also have a cute habit of hiding their more specific complaining behind a ceasar cipher, as well as referring to their users by terms set out by the bastard operator from hell (which you should also check out if you haven’t)

As an aside, it would be awesome if Discourse had a ROT13 plugin of some sort.

  1. Phoronix

Phoronix has some very fun analysis of the dire world of Linux video drivers. People seem to have a sense of humor there. Also, people post long threads about compilers, which is nice to read as well.

  1. KVR

KVR has one of the most used DSP programming forums. If you’ve ever been in the business of writing audio code, it’s one of the places to be.

That’s it. I’m curious to see everyone elses list.

One thing to note is that none of the other forums I use for tech stuff has any well thought forum software. I have to say, I’ve grown to like discourse.

Ubuntu has always been synonymous with community (even if there is a case that it shouldn’t be) and I have always found the official forums to be a great place to hangout (unfortunately activity there on the community side of things have started to reduce significantly :frowning: )

Reddit r/sysadmin

A lot of Reddit as unbelievably trite and stupid, but that is a genuinely good community. There is a strong leaning towards Windows and VMware, but that mirrors the job itself.

the Maeme/Nemo/Sailfish community is great, it’s absolutely incredible how they continued providing updates for devices Nokia has kicked off. They even reverse engineered a whole WhatsApp client.

I have never gone wrong by asking for help at linuxin.dk - yes it is a Danish forum and the language is like Russian for most people - for me it is just plain Danish :smiley:

The Arch Linux community, whuch maintains the wiki, an excellent source of Linux information that applies not only to Arch but all Linux distro. It tells you why you need to install certain package,why something fails in certain architectures, and workarounds to fix it. Most articles are extremely up to date. Excellent learning tool for Linux.

Stack Overflow: great for FAQs about coding. You can find scripts in obscure languages, programming, LaTeX, octave, even gnuplot. Recommendations and constructive discussions are everywhere. A lesson is always learn every time I go there.

LQ not because its father is the guy who says: and now…Bad Voltage. Another source of free support for Linux.

1 Like

The folk who attend Oggcamp tend to be really cool. I’ve made some really good friends via Oggcamp.

1 Like

OMG the ads are intolerable, though.