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.)
so my question here would be: does this mean linux now is ready for the education sector?
No, not for elementary/HS. You have to understand that schools aren’t regular users. They will have 2 top priorities:
- Hardware vender support. There isn’t any vendor that can/does support the volume and pricing that a school will do. While some major vendors are starting to offer Linux pre-installed, they aren’t apart of their educational vendor options.
- They need to have a “drag and drop” security suite. Schools don’t have large/well skilled IT department, so they rely on security suites that “tick off all the boxes”. This allows them an excuse is suddenly little Timmy has porn on their school computers. (This is one of those reasons ChromeOS is becoming so popular. They can issue a device, have the student only have a Google Workspace for Education account, and then walk away. Easy and simple. And yes, there are many websites that can tell you how to get around it, but then the school gets to turn around and claim the student “hacked” it and is in violation of rules X, Y, and Z to which the parent can also be held responsible.)
Until these two issues are solved, Linux won’t be ready for the public education sector. (When the parent issues the device, all rules are gone since it’s up to the parent what limits to place, and all the school will say is that the device must be able to run programs X, Y, and Z.)
For such a setup I think it I’d a good idea to look in to freeipa. Would make management a load more easy.
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
Now students got addicted to linux ricing instead of games, jk good job op and the principal is nice for letting you do that.
When I studied in university - all our computer classes were running Linux, and it was many years ago! Linux proved its effectiveness. When we had russian cyber attack on our banks (virus Petya)- our bank system survived thanks to Linux). Nowadays when twitter, facebook chose nazism - there is only one option to go to decentralized media
based, also I agree decentralized media is the best
its the based form of the internet
I like the idea of free speech and we see that tech giants chose dark side of the world. They are not only spying on people but also manipulating their minds… many still do not realize that they are living in matrix…
Used to run a whole small highschool on Linux Mint, worked pretty well.
Did the same some years ago. It was for the gap between win7 and 10.
Everyone told me it was the best productive time. Because users can’t install stuff and my network blocked a lot of dumb shit.
But now we got new win 11 PCs and every user is back on solitaire or shady websites.
Hey OP, regarding Minecraft: It’s a Java program that uses OpenGL for rendering. Therefore it’s not a Windows game, but inherently cross platform. Here’s the official .deb package https://launcher.mojang.com/download/Minecraft.deb
oh dang, that changes everything
Well for a .deb, the users would need sudo access.
Actually it’s just an archive. It can be easily extracted using
dpkg -x *.deb ~/.localfor example.
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.
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
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… all gives an unmaintained vibe.
And this is supposed to be a tech school…
not yet, might ask if I could be
That’s pretty cool !
If I had to do this myself, I would probably choose NixOS, so that I could write up a config on one of the PCs, and the deploy the exact same thing on every single one and be certain the build is perfectly reproduced.
Though I’m sure there are similar tools for other distros, but that’s what I know.
Cool but why do you ask the teachers? Without asking anyone would be way more funny and more interesting to see what happens
It’s the sort of school gags that people reminisce 20 years later when they sit with their family near cozy fireplace with a pipe of tobacco or crochet
You need to score all the silly memories while you still can.
People, remember the most important when you are young is to have fun. The responsibility and adulting will come for you anyway. You don’t want to be ‚mature for your age’. Have a heckin blast and take no prisonersSober (flatpak) should work for Roblox :) it uses the Android version with some fixes, signing in was a little jank when I tried it but after that flawless!
Sober is pretty decent nowadays. I had it installed for my daughter last week and she’s been playing roblox with no issues besides my old machine ram limitations.
oh I see, well I’ll see what happens in like a month
When I was in high school, computers had Deep Freeze setup, because kids would constantly break the OS and download malware. It’s a software that resets the C drive to a known state on every reboot. You might consider using something similar on classroom workstations.
Also, it might be worth learning about network booting, automating the Linux installer and ansible to install things on every machine at once and automate configuration work.
my school also had windows with deep freeze before they malfunctioned or smth iirc from what principal told me
Yeah, that was also what was used in my school.
The only problem was, it was rarely updated so all the applications were always very outdated. And it was still possible to play Minecraft without any administrator privileges.
Little side note
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
The i7-4790K is still quite powerful, so I’m pretty sure this wasn’t the problem, at all. Perhaps they’re running on an HDD, have little RAM, or you got the CPU wrong.
You can see the CPU and RAM by launching System Info from tbf start menu, and see if it’s running on an SSD or HDD by launching Disks from the menu.
Or they could just have been infected. Especially the ones on Windows 8, which has been EoL for over a year.
we dont have the K, just the regular, eitherway these were fastest computers (lenovo thinkcenter) we have, but there weren’t many of em, most were with the i5 (HP Elitedesk G1)
Bill Gates is responsible for Common Core which has enshitified the education systems of many states. Anything the schools do to stop giving money to Microsoft is a good move.
agreed!
