The funny thing is that their server is probably running on Linux.
I’ll just change my web browser’s user agent then; you’re a fucking website, you don’t need to know which OS I’m using.
It’s amazing how many “unsupported” web apps work perfectly fine once you change the UA. It’s often a completely arbitrary limitation so that they can hire less qualified support staff.
and so they can use browser
vulnerabilitiesfeatures to collect more data on youNope we don’t want to hire anyone who knows anything about Linux, no one uses Linux
“Linux is unsupported”, that’ll work
Everyone: uses a UA switcher
“See? No one uses Linux, 100% of users are on Windows or MacOS”
“Upgrading” to a supported operating system… “Upgrading”.
Yeah, that was also what got into my nerves.
Just had to deal with this last semester. Get a user agent switcher plugin and change your OS to windows, it should work for everything but proctored tests. You’ll likely have to go in person for those
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What “Key features” from an educational course could possibly require windows? It’s spying on you.
TPM2.0 DRM crap?
Does it have online exams? Pearsons shitty anti cheat stuff they use for proctoring is windows and mac only.
Having seen how much people cheat including using someone else using screensharing to proxy the exam for you I cannot blame them for wanting to do this, but I do blame them for not wanting to support Linux properly.
If they’re going to have online exams they need to just accept that cheating is going to happen. There’s a million ways to do that in an environment you control. Make the exams open book but make it harder to account for the fact that the students have access to reference materials.
So, in principle, I agree, but it doesn’t help with proxying, or for example, one I saw this week of someone using AI voice assistant to answer questions. Or people copying and pasting from online groups.
Their shitty software monitors all the connected devices, running processes, and webcam. That’s still needed for open book.
Yea but that takes work, and we’d like, have to pay our teachers more.
Not really a lot of the teachers at the tech school I went to did it that way and I know for a fact they weren’t getting paid well at all.
Then you’re lucky they had the freedom to donate their time like that.
They just don’t want to support it to save dev time/money
Oh yes, the very expensive Dev time cost of zero, because it is a fucking website.
Prolly don’t like that sandboxed browser, so Inconsiderate
I tried to download Microsoft Office on Linux Mint and I couldn’t even download the exe (to run through wine), I needed to go to Windows to download it … now I just need to make it work (I am in the 1% of people who actually need official Excel)
LibreOffice is decent. Have you tried it yet? Anything major it can’t do for you?
I wonder if MAS can work through Mint, even if just to download the installer?
Might try it later.
This might be the right case to use a VM. Though, I just keep a spare SSD with Windows.
Would be great if the web app had the same features as the desktop app
I prefer the desktop app, but things like powerquery won’t work to its fullest online
Ugh, webapps are obnoxious as hell to me. Give me a thick client any day. Biggest irritation for most for me is the loss of keyboard control
Your operating system Ubuntu, is not supported.
Click here to upgrade to Arch, btw.
Your operating system, Arch, is unsupported. Click here to upgrade to Debian.
Your operating system, Arch, is unsupported. Click here to upgrade to Ubuntu.
Its comical that in the last 25 years Linux has gone from a nerd-only tool to something that a 10 year old can install on an air-fryer and still we deal with this bs
Upgrade
Insults on top of incompetence, huh?
It’s Pearson.
Its a parasite
Our website runs on a linux server, can you not use it though
bro, my math and calc professor made us use this for our course despite the fact that our college really wants profs to stop using 3rd party sites like these and just use Brightspace.
It was like $100 CAD too. And it’s a fucking WEBSITE. Why is windows required? Do you need to ring 0 access so I can solve a derivative or something???
Its about data collection under the guise of “security”
It’s also about making it the equivalent of pushing a button for the professor. Want a test that covers chapters X-y? Push three buttons and the students have a test over those chapters. No effort means they can jerk off in the direction of the grant that was just rejected because they used a bad word according to the government.
In my experience professors are heavily overworked and heavily underpaid. Offloading work onto other systems to get a better work-life balance seems like a natural response.
Their deliberate word choice of “upgrade” to supported operating system is mildly infuriating.
They probably assume you are running something like Windows 7
Uhh
Your operating system, Linux, is not supported…
Right, but that could still be given dynamically by a library as “one of the unsupported ones”, getOSName(). They still might not have hard-coded “Linux is bad”.
I’d like to interject for a moment…
They know which operating system you use based on the user agent, so they know it’s Linux.
The program has the information, but that doesn’t mean the people that wrote the code felt it was worth their time to make the “upgrade” text inclusive to Linux, if they even considered the possibility of Linux.
If they were using user agents for identification, Android browsers on “Desktop mode” would be wrongly identified as “Linux”. Even Discord has this issue on their download page. “Premium” Android devices with large screens use Desktop mode by default
Which will be “If not Windows 11 or Mac os then report os string”. I don’t think they specifically took the time to research different OS’s and list them.
They’re probably using a third party library to do user agent detection. I doubt anyone ever tested their code on Linux in the first place. They’re probably writing code like “if Windows version >= 10 or macOS version >= 10.14 or Android version > 10 or iOS version > 14” and Linux just happens to fall through because it has none of those versions.
Captain, what should we do? She’s not on the list.
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That kind of fuckery drove me off a company-sponsored training course.
This is like the Apple Business website, which only works in Safari, according to them. Used the User-Agent Switcher plugin, and the website/dashboard works just fine on Firefox in Linux.
You heard that OP? That’s how you do it, it’ll still work on Linux.
welp, I use Vivaldi without any user-agent switching and it works fine
