It was not a usual office morning, as all the testers (quality engineers) were present in the office early in the morning. Of course, it was a training day for all of us and hence we gathered in the training room so early. An unknown but smiling-faced person entered the training room (by these factors, we recognized him as trainer). Our training  subject was heavily theoretical, so we all were not excited about it.

Only one person in the room looked extra excited about all this and that was “Pandy Ji the Trainer” (Gaurav Pandey). Slowly and steadily, that excitement pumped into everyone’s bloodstream by the magical way of a trainer’s methods of training. No wonder by now everyone in the room knew Pandy Ji for his humorous, funny, and unique style of teaching!

But still there was one thing that bothered everyone present in the room (being a true Fedorian by heart) and that was Pandy Ji’s PowerPoint and the operating system on his laptop. By the afternoon lunch time, the trainer made everyone so comfortable and open that we were no longer shy to tell him to “please change your operating system!” 😀

Presenting an alternate: Fedora

We started telling Pandy Ji about Linux and Fedora enthusiastically and everyone present contributed in the conversation… and just imagine, within a few minutes, the role reverse happened! Pandy Ji became a nice student of over six Linux and Fedora enthusiasts.

We gave Pandy Ji a Fedora 24 DVD. The next day, he came with a brand-new Fedora installation on his laptop. It was real fun for him. He was impressed by some of the awesome commands in Fedora (please note it was his first experience with Linux), speed, and improved performance too. Only some of his old presentations (made in a previous operating system’s office suite) did not work appropriately in LibreOffice. I hope we will fix this too (if someone from LibreOffice contributors is reading this, please help).

I am sure wherever Pandy Ji will go, he will surely talk about Fedora and open source. This was a small, happy step towards spreading knowledge about Fedora and open source, and a lovely end to the year too. We hope to get to meet more people like Pandy Ji in 2017 and include them as a part of Fedora!