Josh

, Martin F. Krafft and Wouter talked about how to explain Debian with a few sentences.

You mustn’t feel awkward about explaining that, instead you should be prepared. If it helps you, think you are selling a product, not showing how “nerdy” you are. You are doing great stuff, you can earn your living with it quite well and you like it. That is perfect, so be proud about it.

You need to have what is called an “elevator pitch”. That is a short preso you could give while going up a few floors with an elevator on your way to a meeting, back, at a conference, at a party…

That format seems most appropriate to me, and there are good guides on how to do elevator speeches. Rehearsing makes sense, too. You’ll however likely want some variants, depending on the audience.

My first stab at writing such a speech:

Debian is a Linux-based operating system [software for computers] made by volunteers, of which I am one. It is in fact one of the most widely used operating systems worldwide, and usually picked because of its reliability and security, while being entirely customizable to fit your needs. And it’s development community really makes the difference, there are so many bright people there, doing amazing new software.

(notice: I extend the development community to floss, beyond just the official DDs, because thats the way it is. There is nothing wroing with bragging about e.g. what the Gnome people do, because you can use it with Debian, too.)

and optionally, depending on the audience:

There are also variants suiteable for novice users, such as schools. You can run it on laptops and desktop computer as well as on mainframes or embedded devices. You can do everything with it.

or:

The city of munich is just switching to it for their computers. This saves the city a lot of money, while becoming independant from Microsoft.

or:

Our computer science department has almost only Linux on its computers. And many other universities do the same. Can you think how cool it is to have millions around the world use your software?

and of course:

That is so cool, I can do stuff I really like to do, meet really cool and bright people and earn my living doing so. That’s heaven on earth.

[Update: someone might consider the use of “guys” to be sexistic. Well, of course there are very cool grrrls there, too. I’ve replaced it with “people” now, so I don’t neet to explain grrrls next. ;-)]