I go to a programming school, where there were computers running ancient windows 8 and some were on windows 10, they ran really slow and were completely unrelaible when doing the tasks that are required, those computers in question had either i5-4750 (I think?) or i7-4970 so running windows 10 with all its bloat was not going to be an easy task for em, so long story short I decided to talk to the principal about it explaining why linux is so much better than windows and gave him reasons why linux will be better for us for education and he agreed after considering it for a bit, he let me know that some students play roblox or minecraft in middle of the lesson and he asks if linux would stop em from doing that, I stated that as long as they dont know how to work with wine/lutris or know any specific linux packages that run windows games on linux they should not be able to play in the middle of lessons. he gave me the green light to do it, so I spent like 3 days migrating like 20+ computers to linux (since I had to set them up and install some required applications for them) in the last day where I was doing a last check up on the PCs to make sure they are in working order, there was a computer having a problem of which where it didnt boot, I let the principal know about this to get permission to work on it, he said yes, so after some troubleshooting I realized the boot order was all screwed, so since Ive worked with arch before I knew how to fix it, I booted up linux mint live image, chrooted, and fixed the boot order and computer went back to life, prinicipal came in checked on everything to make sure everything works, told me to wait for a bit, and then came back and paid me for his troubles (was a bit of a surprised since I expected nothing of the sort), the next day I came to school, sat down, turned PC on, noticed something was in the trash bin, opened it, found “robloxinstall.exe” on it, told the principal about it, he was pleased with it, so now 2 weeks later he seems now to be confident about linux, as he told me there is another class he is considering to move to linux.
so my question here would be: does this mean linux now is ready for the education sector?
(considering now, that I got a win win situation, I get to use an OS that I like in school, students gets to focus on the lessons instead of slacking.)
I’ve actually been using linux with older customers for years. It solves several problems. First, it lets them get more life out of their older machines. Second, its free. Third, the kind of malware that targets linux systems isnt really a factor for little old man on facebook. Finally, when scammers call, they cant establish credibility with my customers. They get in, remote access barely works thanks to wayland not liking their tools yet. The entire system looks different and the commands are different so they dont understand how it works but the customer does. So the scam falls apart where they try to prove they know what they are talking about because they cant use the terminal properly. It always ends the same way. My customers get suspicious and say “I’m going to call my computer guy” and the hang up.
This trick has been successful for years and my users are very happy not to have to deal with microsoft’s bullshit. The fact that it confuses the hell out of scammers is just a nice bonus.
Using Linux in the university back in 2004 helped make the jump to Linux at home and I have been using it for 20 years now.
Linux has been ready for some time within various educational programs, but maybe you are referring to relatively early education curriculum in public schools? The general anecdotes I’ve heard from teachers within a variety of grade levels in the USA (mostly elementary and high school levels, but some doctoral engineering/scientific as well) convey that the largest hurdles to overcome are:
- Teaching the teachers. Teachers are usually very smart and capable, but are often chronically overworked, overstressed, and underpaid for their labor. They have limited mental bandwidth in learning new tech workflows while having the added obligation of teaching these workflows to students which may be at an attention/interest deficit.
- Challenging the status quo at the administrative level. Schools often receive incentives, grants, steep discounts, etc, for installing certain types of hardware or software packages. The software baselines of some schools are restricted at the district level; many public libraries are restricted by the city/county. Perhaps the best approach here is to install Linux as a “secondary” option (similar to how a smaller number of e.g. Macs may be installed in a computer lab comprised mostly of Windows computers) until it’s more widely adopted.
- Advocating for equivalent Linux support for popular proprietary software. This is especially true for the creative design community, such as graphic design and professional music production. Adobe is usually the target of criticism here; Linux does not currently hold enough market share to capture Adobe’s attention while their patrons usually have unwavering brand loyalty or are unwilling to make any tooling/workflow compromises as to maintain their livelihood.
- FOSS-friendly awareness campaigns. Showing people that they can remain productive while not being at the mercy of Big Tech. Not using public funds for private industry.
- Feature parity case studies compared to proprietary options.
- Overcoming the stereotype that Linux is only for techy people, shrouded by gatekeepers, or subject to drama/infighting.
Liberation
Is there not some kind of RMM software you could be using to install the same setup on all of them simultaneously? How about monitoring? Firewalls?
I was thinking of Pop!_OS but also heard about NixOS that could be even run on Mid-2012 MacBook Pro.
Now I want to attend your school!
Wish I could do that when my school computers had Dos and Turbo Pascal. Ah, the good old himem.sys times. Miles better than W11.
You are doing the lords work and I ain’t even a christian
Man seriously aren’t you happy with the 2% of users that use Linux right now?, I m telling you for certain, if Linux bites a larger piece of that pie Microsoft is munching for decades, their coders will unleash an influx of any kind of viruses to show how “shitty” Linux are, I really feel safe to be on that 2%, let people find their own way.
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Woohoo, some hacker kid is about to install Sober and Prism and will be the hero for everyone.
My kid’s elementary school has a computer club handling all the PCs. The other day they were surprised to hear that the PCs they were playing GCompris, Ktuberling, Pingus, Super Tux, Tuxpaint and Tux Kart on are running Linux.
another example of: one of the best ways to teach children is to trick them.
try to force them to use linux and the terminal? booooring, hell no….
give them linux computers without games?
they’re 1337 haxors in two weeks… with skills that will help them for life….
especially if they ever get locked in a building with velociraptors….that’s how I learned firewalls and networking lmao
couldn’t access my games, so I found ways around the firewalls and network blocks, just to play on coolmathgames lmao
Same. School firewall blocked based on host names, so we all learned a lot about the hosts file so we could manually set all of the IPs Minecraft needed to authenticate.
Ooh clever. I was able to get around mine by opening sites in an iframe, I made a bookmarklet for it
I’m sure the velociraptors helped you stay focused too.
Clever girl…
haha, I think I got a worldwide high score at the time, or at was close to one back then.
Or they’ll install portable versions of Minecraft so many times they’ll decide to learn how to remove -rubbishfiles from root
I prefer removing the -french language pack on every install. The command comes with a typo though, so you need to fix that for it by adding
/*
at the endmais pourquoi ?
my dad gave me permission to break the family computer as much as i wanted, and he would just take it to work and reinstall everything from an image….
now i can fix computer problems
This is how (at least elder) millennials learned everything they know about technology. It’s the only way imo
Hmm I was clearly too well behaved. Most of my knowledge of computers came through wanting to program them to do cool stuff, not bypass restrictions. The cheatiest thing I can remember doing is copying a cool puzzle game from the school computer onto a flash drive so I could play it at home, so I guess I did it backwards?
my dad told me like 5 dos commands, gave me permission to do whatever or break whatever on the home computer his work provided, told me there was some games on there but he didn’t know where… and i figured out the rest pretty much… whenever i broke it he’d just take it to work and bring it back fixed.
this was back in the wild wild west, where the hospital IT had one master hard drive image, and people threw random games and programs on there…
i was always surprised how ok he was with me breaking it weekly, but looking back on it i think he was proud…
i was really lucky in that i had free reign on yearly updated computers, starting on dos when i had just learned how to read, and growing up with that through all the versions of windows…
i mean, i hate microsoft and all, but i just think it’s crazy all of these people have super computers in their pockets and are afraid of the terminal….
it’d be hard to start a kid on the terminal first now, when they can use a touch screen in the crib….
my first computer didn’t even have pictures, but the next one did…Nice. In what year(s) did you have your first computer?
That’s one of the great things about switching to Linux … it forces you to learn something new and for kids that is a very good thing.
All those kids in the school that OP described were getting stagnant in a settled environment of living in Windows … now that they have Linux in front of them, they will go on to learn how to subvert the system under Linux. It’s not a bad thing in my opinion, it will create a whole crop of kids who now know how to fool around with Windows AND Linux.
I wish someone would have introduced me to Linux when I was kid.
yeah, that’s hopefully what I hope to happen, perhaps raising a generation of kids on linux will help linux to grow in marketshare!
For what it’s worth, the school computers in my school weren’t running Linux and they had Tuxpaint installed. Even proprietary OS users benefit from FOSS.
I think most kids these days like to play bedrock edition, so it will be harder anyways.
Theres a flatpak for that.
you’re lucky to have an open-minded principle
Principal*
Not being pedantic, just thought I’d let you and others know there are multiple ways to spell this word.
I will be pedantic. There is only one way to spell each word; principal and principle are different words (though they share a root).
I was afraid someone would do that.
true, normally people would be too afraid
They’re often having to juggle with very low budgets, old equipment, low skill and zero support. And that’s before you add children…
I don’t doubt they jumped at the chance of someone helping out.
There is way to do this that works with even older computers and is easy to manage.
That’s with Edubuntu and thin-client computing using the Linux Terminal Server project, LTSP.
In that model, you install Linux once on a server. Each computer in the lab is set to boot over the network from the server.
This way there is one computer to maintain, the users can’t access root and all the storage is centralized.
Even old computers with low CPU and RAM and no hard drive can make good thin clients.
A number of schools have been using this approach for 15+ years.
15+… I was there, Gandalf… We had these kinds of setups 25+ years ago. How time flies.
Before that, it was often XTerm style systems. The local machine only booted an XServer and then connected to a central UNIX system. All programs ran on the UNIX server, and were rendered on the XTerm/XServer you were sitting at.
The original XServer systems were efficient enough to run over serial lines, not just Ethernet.
Another setup was to put multiple monitors/keyboards/mice on a single UNIX/Linux tower and have it launch multiple XServer sessions so you could have a single computer with up to six people sitting at it.
I also managed a Rembo lab for a bit. It used a PXE shim OS to get a menu from the Rembo server. From there, you could boot the main OS, or download a new hard drive image from the server. I would build new drive images and upload them to the server, then updating the lab would mean rebooting the computers and clicking a “grab latest” button. It actually worked very well for distributing OSes. We had both Linux and Windows images students could pull down.
Lab management at scale is a continual struggle to keep everything functional and patched.
now i’m sad that this is (afaik) impossible in the future with everything switching to wayland
I haven’t looked into it too hard yet. I saw some design that would allow remote GUI rendering for Wayland, but it likely won’t be the all in design for network transparency that X11 had (has).
I use SSH with X forwarding for all kinds of system maintenance and demos in my CS courses.
I didnt know this actually! thanks!
You could also set up one machine with all the required software and clone the OS simultaneously to all computers over LAN with Clonezillla.
this is actually so insanely epic, good job!
pretty cool of the principal too to allow you to do stuff like this
ikr, didn’t expect him to agree
Seconding the last part. When I was in high school, the admins wouldn’t approve most after school clubs, or students displaying their artwork. Here this admin is encouraging their students’ curiosity and talents, while letting the students have real impact in their school. Grade A stuff right there.