That was one of the specific bullet points in my original post on this topic. That certainly is a factor.

One of the peaks of activity in Canada happened September 26, 1998 when LUGs across the country participated in the National Installfest, holding open houses and helping install Linux on any computers people would bring in. TLUG (as GTALUG was known pre-incorporation) hosted events both at Seneca's Don Mills campus and at UofT. I was very proud to have been one of the coordinators of that event.

But another factor in the decline of the utility of LUGs was the Internet and specifically YouTube. Installation tutorials have been plentiful there for a long time, so the need to wait for a monthly meeting that might be some distance away was greatly reduced. One can just type their installation question into Google's (now Gemini-enhanced) search engine and it will offer blogs and vlogs with answers.

There are two distinct factors at play:

- As discussed above, installation and troubleshooting no longer demand in-person, real-time responses from a volunteer.

- The ubiquity of Linux across the computing world, except for the consumer desktop, has eliminated the passion component; there is little advocacy left to do. We've won. Microsoft, once the main obstacle and denigrator of Linux, is now a top kernel contributor and has made interoperability far easier. Even games, the final frontier of incompatibility, are now working with Linux at a scale unimaginable by the original developers of Wine. One never hears of the free-software-versus-open-source arguments anymore because nobody cares; outside of Debian and a few scattered outposts you don't even see the terms "GNU/Linux" or "FLOSS" much anymore; the dogmatism that underlies such terminology is now simply boring.

I may be wrong, but I see it as a generational thing as I view the world of tech first through the eyes of my children and now my grandchildren.

Attitudes have shifted dramatically IMO regarding privacy and centralization. Major global data breaches are met with a shrug, much of the population seems to have no problem with foreign apps scraping everything on their mobile device, and VPNs are more of a tool for evading geoblocking than to protect communications.

Person-to-person communications has suffered dramatically on a global scale, and LUGs are but one casualty of that. Everything from dating to job interviews has suffered immensely. Long before the arrival of AI people were trusting tech and the people found through tech for personal advice and companionship. I shudder when I hear some of my grandkids' friends assert that "influencer" is a legitimate career goal.

One is reminded that the movie "Idiocracy"  was made back in 2006. Its prediction of society's direction is far too close to reality than I'd like. So are too many episodes of Black Mirror.

- Evan