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.)
Next step is to teach the students WINE. ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ
I’ll let them figure that out themselves xddd
Give them easy access to .exe games??? They should have to put in the effort to slack off during class.
The pictures OP posted suggest the distro is Mint. At the last time I installed it, I remember double clicking a exe file brings up a dialogue which asks if I want to run it through WINE.
Mint doesn’t come with WINE out of the box if I’m remembering correctly. While trivial for most of us, it might be effective enough as a hurdle for the kids. Especially if installing it is locked behind su permissions.
Figure out your mass deployment strategy and the tooling that you’ll need to support it. The reason why Ubuntu and rhel are popular in these kinds of sectors is because of this tooling
Nice work, you did a good thing 😊
thank 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.
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Or they’ll install portable versions of Minecraft so many times they’ll decide to learn how to remove -rubbishfiles from root
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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 ?
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.
haha, I think I got a worldwide high score at the time, or at was close to one back then.
Clever girl…
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?
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Nice. In what year(s) did you have your first computer?
This is how (at least elder) millennials learned everything they know about technology. It’s the only way imo
I think most kids these days like to play bedrock edition, so it will be harder anyways.
Theres a flatpak for that.
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.
This is great for a handful of devices but I deploy and administrate hundreds of devices at my school. As much as I would love to, there’s no way I could sell this without a really robust way of managing device policies & software deployment. I understand RHEL has something like that but that it isn’t quite up to the same standard as the Microsoft admin ecosystem just yet.
You should take a look at Ansible, it’s the same problem as infra teams in tech companies to manage Linux deployment and it’s a mostly solved problem
Yeah, I have this conversation and lot on the sad truth is that until there’s a Linux distro that’s as manageable as Windows is with Group Policy, no big organisation is adopting it. Unfortunately, nothing in the Linux space comes close.
ah fair enough, hopefully one day, there is an easy way for linux to do what your school are looking for!
for my school they teach programming as such python webdev etc, so getting linux primed up for that was rather simple, I’m surprised, they haven’t did this before I suggested it!
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.
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.
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.
Don’t teach the kids about flatpak. Then they will soon discover Roblox/sober.
not like they have the balls to use the terminal anyways, they saw me install vim there and they freaked out “are you some sort of hacker?” they said, and I looked confused at first before I realized they were talking about me using the terminal, which I become accustomed to it since I used linux for so long.
Minecraft Java Edition runs natively in Linux. But kids these days are probably playing Bedrock… chumps.
probably, I haven’t been paying that much attention to them on class tbh lmao
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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And IMO if one of those students can get Roblox working on Linux, they have solved a harder problem than any homework they would be given 😆.
I’m curious how ootb mint works out for this usecase. Any chance we could get a 6mo update later? I’m particularly curious how well it holds up against non-admin users who may constantly be trying to get root-level access. There’s almost certainly going to be one student who figures out a local privilege escalation.
Sure! I might even make a follow up to explain the whole thing in detail, however I fear it may be too long for one post, should I perhaps make an entry in a neocities website I just finished making? I could probably make it like a diary with detailed entries and stuff, idk if yall up for it, otherwise I’ll just post it here in parts.
but right now, I’m tired, so I’ll probably write it tomorrow.
Please do! I’m curious to hear about the specifics, mainly in how you set up administration (as Windows does have surprisingly good group admin tools)
sure I’ll make a new post about it when the page in the site is ready, so look forward to it!
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.
They should be cleaned out regardless if the school intends to keep using them.
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…
@[email protected] 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).
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)
I wouldn’t be shocked if more schools start looking for open source options as their funding gets cut by the current regime.
Germany already moved their tech stack to FOSS alternatives for their government assigned computers!
there is actual progress that’s being made 🥳
I believe soon will a kid learn to install roblox、Minecraft and teach other kids ☠️
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