LinuxChix
LinuxChix was a community for women who liked Linux and for anyone who wanted to support women in computing. We were an international group of Free Software users and developers, founded in 1999 with the aim of supporting women in Linux. Founder Deb Richardson described it as an alternative to the locker room atmosphere found in some online technical forums and gave LinuxChix two core rules: be polite and be helpful. LinuxChix was many things to many people, but it remained primarily a group for supporting women in computing, specifically in Open Source/Free Software/Software Libre computing.
LinuxChix was continually active since 1999, and its mailing lists had attracted over twenty five hundred members worldwide. In addition, it had over fifteen active regional chapters all over the world, including LinuxChix Africa, LinuxChix India and LinuxChix Brazil. LinuxChix members ranged from novice Linux users to Linux kernel developers and technical and project leads.
Deb Richardson started LinuxChix because she was tired of seeing new users being browbeaten for asking stupid questions. She was tired of seeing people respond to perfectly valid questions with RTFM, we're not a Linux help channel, and other such not-terribly-useful things. She wanted to attempt to create a more hospitable community in which people could discuss Linux, a community that encouraged participation and that didn't allow the quieter among us to be drowned out by the vocal minority. She also wanted to run a group that was aimed at women.
Deb's original directive was Be polite. Be helpful. You're bright people. Extrapolate. In other words, we didn't need a lengthy, detailed rule book because it was all covered by Be polite, Be helpful.
LinuxChix offered a welcoming, safe space for women interested in computing by creating a sense of community and providing an opportunity for women to be visible in the tech world. Entirely volunteer-run, LinuxChix members taught online courses on a variety of topics from C programming to Unix filesystems as well as lifestyle courses such as computing careers and spineful living. A variety of mailing lists offered women a place to ask questions, whether it was about programming, building kernels or how to build a website.
In the late 2010s and 2020s, interest waned and the mailing lists and IRC channels became less and less active. In 2025, a decision was made to cease operations. The former LinuxChix site has been archived by the Internet Archive, as has the courses site. You can find the archived LinuxChix site here and the archived courses site here.
