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.)
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.
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!
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.
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.
Just a funny story, but, I use an Ubuntu laptop as my work computer as a teacher, and once, while I was helping another student with work, a student opened my laptop and began trying to install Roblox. She got far enough to figure out it wouldn’t work, and started searching for how to install it. When I came over she was trying to figure out how to set up Wine. She got pretty close to getting it working before I came over. I was secretly pretty impressed with how fast she figured it out. It couldn’t have been more than a few minutes.
Teh kidz r al rite.
that’s actually an interesting story, makes you wonder if kids nowadys do get exposed to linux first and not windows, would actually learn it faster than having to unlearn windows first?
Or they’re so used to smartphone that windows and Linux are equally alien to them
we dont have those people…yet, I fear for the day when we do though…
Having taught college level students software development, Ctrl-c & ctrl-v was foreign to many
that’s quite unfortunate
i’ve had the same situation with university students
I wouldn’t even be mad honestly. I learned a ton of my early computer skills trying to get stuff running where I shouldn’t or get into things I had no business messing with. That’s how kids learn!
Gives me hope, I’m glad the kids are still curious and willing to learn. I’ve seen too many early-20s people at work who have absolutely zero computer skills.
lol I thought this was a guerrilla IT warfare post where you snuck in and did it, but you actually did it with permission… 😂
yeah, I don’t want trouble xD
Could you imagine the stories that would circulate in the playgrounds? “I heard the Linux fairy is close. Timmy can’t play Roblox in class anymore.”
Linux was always ready for the education sector. I think already for 10 years now.
fair enough, I just hope at some point schools and organizations switches to the cool penguin.
Back in my days I was also disappointed that schools weren’t using Linux. So I totally agree with you.
It was ready since day one. Linus wrote Linux while a student at the University of Helsinki. It was inspired by MINIX, which was also targeted for use in schools.
When I heard about schools using Chromebooks literally the first thing I said was “Linux can do more than a Chromebook can and is free, why the hell aren’t they using that?!” Linux running on the cheapest OEM laptop (make sure you get ones without the prepaid Windows license so you don’t spend more than you need to) is a better experience than the most expensive Chromebook.
The user experience is not as important as the management tooling.
My highschool used Ubuntu exclusively back in 2010
This is a great story, and you should be really proud of yourself! Good job :). I used Linux through college and had very few issues (that I can remember!)
thanks, mind telling me what were those issues? I’m kinda curious, perhaps I should have a mental note for those if they are related to what I just did
It’s been too long, but seems like I had some problems with formatting getting wrecked between Word and LibreOffice. It probably works a lot better now, not to mention that you can just access Word in the browser if really necessary.
ahhhhh okay yeah I agree, my friend (who is also a long time linux user as much as I am one as well) does complain a bit about word processing apps on linux and I quote “basic word processing works alright on linux with libreoffice and onlyoffice, but once you put advanced stuff in it, its a bit difficult to work with”, he seemed to have problems with docx files (iirc) so he has a windows VM where he uses MS office for stuff that he is required to work on, and continue to use linux for everything else.
I used Linux in university also, and actually had LESS problems than my classmates - a few of our textbooks came with “homework” versions of industry software (made by the textbook writer, just coded to be good enough to learn some basic concepts and work with some provided example files) and for reasons unknown to man and beast, most of them worked better on wine than on Windows natively - for one, the “submit” button was basically off-screen on Windows but placed where you’d expect on wine, on another trying to connect to machines was a HUGE pain… Except the Linux networking interface had no issues haha.
I only switched because the forced upgrade to Windows 8 ate my first year midterm essays and I never forgave it.
Are you now the IT support guy for these workstations, or is the school’s IT going to take over maintenance. I guess you have an internship or something if you are.
the school’s IT
I wonder if that even exists. A mix of Windows 8 (EoL) and 10 (almost EoL) running on Haswells with students freely installing Roblox… it all gives an unmaintained vibe.
I always assumed schools had at least one or two IT people who just are spread really thin or something. Never occurred to me that an organization would just have PCs with no admin, but it sounds plausible. I guess the instructors just have to fix things if they run into issues.
And this is supposed to be a tech school…
Sounds like ITT technical institute. God I hated working with the “graduates” they put out. Absolute morons.
not yet, might ask if I could be
They probably are, At the UTP in Panama they will contact some students (based on what idk presumably on impressions of performance) to do IT for them, it’s not technically an internship it’s a regular job that’s part time
And if they learn about wine and lutris and manage to install Roblox, they’ll probably get more out of it than by listening to the class in the first place !
I learned so much by circumventing the school security stuff. I probably wouldn’t be in IT if not for the parental control limitations and school network blocks
