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.)

  • Xatolos@reddthat.com
    353·
    1 day ago

    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:

    1. 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.
    2. 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.)

    • emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works
      3·
      13 hours ago

      Schools in India already use Ubuntu. To be fair we benefit from having some local manufacturing assembling. There’s usually no security beyond whatever linux offers by default.

    • Littux@lemmy.world
      6·
      22 hours ago

      Every government school here uses Linux. And there’s no security (password is “password” even for root account). The only reason it works is because everyone has common sense on what they shouldn’t do. The worst any kid could do is visit a “bad” site on a browser because no one knows how to do anything else.

      Even the exam software assumes you don’t know how things in Linux works:

      • The scores and answers are stored in simple non-encrypted SQLite3 databases at a directory in /usr/share.
      • During the exam, the panel for launching applications is hidden, so you can’t cheat on questions like “What does this tool do in GIMP?” by opening GIMP. But you can just do Ctrl + Alt + T to launch the Terminal and Alt + Tab to switch to it.

      I easily qualified for a State level competition where the education minister visited and had big news agencies visiting that made up a lot of nonsense. You can probably guess what the average student will be like from this

    • bluewing@lemm.ee
      5·
      1 day ago

      Linux is kind of sort is already in elementary and high school use. Schools in my state are often issuing Chromebooks to students for use. They are cheap, easy to manage and get support for, and can do the things students need to do. And the only ones really using all those old Macs that infest schools are the teachers. Though in my local school, the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th grades are using iPads but switch to Chromebooks in 5th grade.

      One can complain about google being evil all you want, but they do offer all the free tools schools and teachers and students need for their lessons.And if COVID taught schools anything it was that we could teach classes online if necessary-- no more snow days.