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.)
It takes one technology inclined person to set it up, it’s just takes another one to find a workaround, now the success of Linux in preventing gamers from doing their think depends on whether the second person decides to make the workaround known
yes but they will have to learn the OS, thats also a good thing
yeah i also think that if people get their things to run, they probably learned something in the process
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.
I was thinking of Pop!_OS but also heard about NixOS that could be even run on Mid-2012 MacBook Pro.
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.
Does your school have an it department? If not maybe that can be a job for you. Someone will need to maintain that fleet.
Beats me. maybe they do, maybe they don’t? I honestly have no clue, perhaps I should ask.
YES on the ask!!! Seconded big time
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.
Any software in Linux can be used in education, as long as the schools invest the time:
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LibreOffice can create really nice documents and presentations too. Heck, some tasks are more straightforward in LibreOffice than MS. 99% of schoolwork is done in Office suite, so this is nice. Win for Linux
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For stuff like coding in C or Python, it is even easier in Linux: download a compiler, open a text editor, type some codes then use terminal to run the codes in 10 minutes. In Windows, you need to download the stupid Cygwin and mess around with environmental variables to get Cygwin to recognize the libraries… Or if you want to automate things, MS Visual Studio will do that. The only downside is you will lose > 10 GB of space. Linux wins here again.
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Anything more advanced will unfortunately Windows land. I’m talking about advanced image programs like Photoshop or professional video apps. But again, if you need them then might as well get a Mac. Another hiccup would be in CAD software: Linux just doesnt have a good app.
tbf with all due respect Screw Adobe, idek why people even use their products, KDENLive and GIMP serve well, for the tasks I doing, and even if you want something more advanced, there is davinci resolve, it’s proprietary software but its forgivable if KDENLive isn’t cutting it for you
Some of the bigger issues with Kdenlive i’ve heard is around GPU acceleration and just force of habbit. Fair enough, I wouldn’t tell someone to jump ship if they productivity and professional skills are taking a hit. People need their livelihood. Still I do hold that most people overestimate how pro their workflow is
I mean, it’s never a good idea to FORCE anything but the “normies” (pardon my french) always use that as an excuse when there are definitely alternatives that are usable and can definitely do the job (ie: davinci resolve), like do seriously people wanna keep using software from a company that charges you CANCELATION FEES?
(how did adobe get away with charging you more money for cancelling your subscription, iirc it was like 60 or 80 bucks???)
Ohh yeah for sure. Most of these proprietary software are costing on brand names and institutional momentum.
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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
Can’t you just change this in the BIOS?
does this mean linux now is ready for the education sector?
Linux has always been suitable (and I would argue ideal) in the education sector. But the reality is that almost no one is going to use Linux in a professional environment so there’s an argument to be made that they should be using and learning Winblows.
I tried but, grub itself was malfunctioning, so I fixed it with chroot and a live mint iso
That’s super awesome
Buuuut my guest gaming machine is a 4670k machine and I can confirm that not only does Windows 10 run very smoothly on it, but it also runs most modern games at 60+FPS! CPU-bound games can struggle. We finally got my partner a new computer and made that one the guest machine when Persona 5 went from 80FPS down to 5FPS when they got off the train hahaha
oh haha I see, I’ve been using linux for 5 years so far and I have been ONLY gaming on linux, I have ditched windows for good, this switch was very easy to me cuz I dont have any windows specfic apps/games dependency, everything I want is there, and the ones that aren’t, there are alternatives that are the same or better than the apps I’ve used on windows!
Ugh I would love to switch solely to Linux but I have ONE GAME that I play online with friends that’s an incredibly ridiculous install process and it is impossible to run on Linux without issues. It’s amazing that it even runs on Windows nowadays. (The Specialists, a mod for the original Half Life.)
you could play with a VM with GPU pass-through or have a seperate computer running windows made JUST to play that game (if you are wealthy enough), however these are merely suggestions, and it’s always up to you
Nahhh thank you, hahaha. My other machines are Linux, we just keep our high end gaming machines on Windows. That older computer with the 4670k is getting Pop! OS when I get around to it.
ah okay understood, fair enough, also PopOS is pretty good, cosmic is coming up pretty nicely, might give it a try when it gets to stable branch!
Oh and I should specify my old guest machine does have 16GB of RAM, solid state drives, and an RTX2070, so it’s probably a bit better equipped than school machines hahaha
great specs! I have a slightly underpowered computer compared to yours, R5 5600H and RX6500M, and I’m also a persona fan, great series tbh, my favorite is persona 4, its the most fun game to me in the series so far, rn I’m playing through P3 Reload!
Oooo nice! My partner has the best machine in the house now, since they always got my hand-me-downs and never a brand new machine. We built it about a year ago, so it’s got a 12600k, 32GB RAM, a 3070, 3TB SSD space, and 4TB HDD. Mine’s not terribly far from that, but I am a little envious hahaha
Ooo and yah, I’m doing P3R after P5!
Is linux ready for the education sector? Kinda depends on the tools involved.
If its a google classroom kind of workflow and or everything is done in the browser, absolutely. Theres a reason Chromebooks got popular for schools, not just cause they’re cheap, but being more locked down and basically only useful for in browser work made them a good alternative to Windows machines.
However, some stuff specific to certain courses or classes may not be compatible with linux. Something like a photo editing college course that requires adobe (ew) would be an example.
I’d personally love to see Linux in the education sector more. With immutable distros, no licensing costs, and lower hardware requirements, Linux is likely going to be really attractive to schools that are looking for alternatives.
So sick that you were able to do this. Kudos for taking the initiative and making your community better.
With fydeOS (or flex) you can now convert any PC or Mac to a Chromebook , that’s a good option for schools now imo
oh, thanks, sorry for taking so long to reply, I didn’t notice your comment till now, I got a swarm of comments that they kinda burried yours, but yeah uhhh we do programming so setting those computers up for that was rather simple, also I agree adobe stinks!
Next month: The principal complains that the students play SuperTuxKart now. :)
lmaooooo, well they have to touch the terminal or figured out that there is a software store first…and know the sudo password kek
What about flatpak tho? https://flathub.org/apps/net.supertuxkart.SuperTuxKart
they are newbies, who are accustomed to windows, I doubt they’ll know how to get games on linux yet, however they might figure it out if they learned how, and thats lowkey also good cuz they get to know how to use the OS
They are newbies, for now.
I have had a Linux Mint USB (installed, not live) with me since middle school. Not the same one, of course, that was USB 2.0.
SanDisk CruzerBlade seems to work pretty well. On the other hand, a Panasonic flash drive I have is absolute shit for random access. Booting up install from it will take ages and then it will freeze up all the time.External SSD would be best, but it’s not worth it for occasional use.
yeah for now, if they learned how tbh they earned their short gaming session, however I should discuss with the principal this matter.
also I have a Toshiba USB which works really nice, I have it setup with ventoy so I can do multiboot (I have a lot linux distro and both freeBSD and OpenBSD)
How did you install them? One by one? Wouldn’t this be the perfect case for fedora’s atomic distros?
yes, one by one, and I choose mint because It was approachable, and thats what I showed to the principal to convince him to let me do this in the first place, and oh I didnt know there was an atomic version of fedora
I don’t judge you for the choice. It’s an honest question since you take care of a lot of computers and with ublue you’d have good control of the machines
oh no make no mistake, I was not implying that, I’m just explaining why I choose mint, I now learned that there are distros that can be deployed on multiple PCs at once thanks to you, so thanks a bunch!
Congratulations on your win.
Although it is fun to run around updating each PC individually, as the install numbers increase, Clonezilla can be helpful to multicast one OS image to many PCs in parallel.
yeah uhhh I’m wondering if I could ask the principal to let me come around once a month to update the computers
Was recommending this to speed up your next fresh lab install. :^)
ooooooooh, right rightz my bad I’m dumb
I don’t think that at all (c:
If you had installed bazzite those kids would worship you
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.
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!
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…
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?
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.
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.
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.
Holy shit if there’s that much dust on the front grille of the computer I can’t even imagine how much is caked on the internal heat sinks. I bet you could literally double the speed of these computers with a vacuum or air blower.
probably but I wasn’t allowed to open them (Its too much work for 20+ computers) but atm they got double the speed compared to before with windows
They really need to clean the computers out or they may eventually cook themselves and then nothing will run on them.
Nah, anything even slightly modern will see the high temperature and throttle down to keep from cooking.
might tell the principle that tbh, we’ll see what he’s gonna do about it.
Principal.
(yeah I know it’s rude to correct spelling, but if you want to impress him, spelling his title correctly may help.)
my bad…
@LumpyPancakes@lemm.ee kinda burying lede ish
He’s your princiPAL
no one could remember it without that pneumonic!
These spelling mistakes make me tyred.
Dust can also block connections. I remember a 64 GB RAM system becoming 128 GB when it was cleaned (two sticks; one was clogged).
