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.)
This is awesome. I hope the students don’t start enjoying xbill :p
Lol, blast from the past…
I looked up xbill and this looks fun, I might try it on my computer actually! thanks btw
But if you left tomorrow would they be able to admin them?
They will just wipe these computers
I don’t think they will bother. They will end up in a landfill, and the school will buy new Windows computers.
good question however principal said he wanna keep linux on them forever, perhaps he will learn it and admin them himself, thats my guess
Maybe write up some basic admin instructions (updating, services start/stop, user management, etc). Hire yourself out as a consultant on call if you leave :D
ancient windows 8
😠
windows 8 is 13 years old…
13 years old is ancient to you?
My mouse is older than that…
Btw I would recommend leaving a note on the desktop saying something like COMPUTER_SPECS.TXT. I had Linux on my computers in school, and I was thinking “holy crap Linux is slow and old”, but it turned out to be cheap hardware (and I didn’t know better, back then)
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.
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.
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
Before I read the text, I was going to ask,
“Umm did they know you were doing it?” It would be funny if you just did it without asking leaving them wondering, “How the hell did this happen?”
You know it’s bad when Shadow IT starts migrating your inventories.
It’s like the elf that helps the shoemaker at night.
You have done a remarkable job already.
Linux is a free and open operating system. The licence for it - GNU Public License v2 is designed to grant you and me and my wife and your family and everyone everywhere rights and not restrict our rights. The only restriction with the GPL is that if you make a change to the code, that you make it available to everyone.
Education should be about teaching concepts and ideas and ideals. I think it should not involve artificial costs that might constrain access to a full and fruitful education. Those costs might even involve … thou shalt update to Windows 11 and your laptop’s CPU is not good enough.
Please keep on doing what you are doing, in your way. When you have your school running as you think it should, there is a good chance that you will be asked to do the same thing for other schools.
Please make sure you have the full support of your school principal (I think that is the right term - I’m from Britain so we might have different names for jobs)
I run a small IT company in the UK and I am trying to put together a distribution and so on for my company. Perhaps I should try your approach and be a bit more direct.
Cheers mate Jon
thank you for your very well thought out comment, and I do know about the GPL, I use it myself in my projects (AGPL for my neocities website and GPL3.0 for some of my other projects), the GPL is a very good license to your most important projects and I never skip it, I only use like BSD/MIT/CC0 for stuff that I dont really care that much about, also I love Britain its a wonderful country, cheers! also good luck!
Next step is to teach the students WINE. ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ
I’ll let them figure that out themselves xddd
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.
Give them easy access to .exe games??? They should have to put in the effort to slack off during class.
I love it. Way to go!
thanks a lot!
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!
Linux over here being all environmental and shit.
real lmao
Linux is so good today. Windows is increasingly shooting itself in the foot and MacOS requires a huge premium (and also billionaires suck) which is increasingly incompatible with budget conscious sectors like education. Really great stuff if you’re managing to get people to love it there.
a lot definitely started to open up to it I think, I overheard 2 students wanted to try it on their laptops, so my move definitely did smth
… And this is how you land in IT work
I’ll be definitely cool if I somehow land such job lol
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good idea, I will keep that in mind.
Definitely ask your principal for a recommendation.
You will regret it in 500 years though.
I was forced to learn Bloatscript (JS) cant get any worse than this lolololol xd
It will all be Chromebooks and software as a service by then. Unless you work as a SaaS vendor, then it will be automatically orchestrating docker containers.
To be fair, I just replaced my Chromebook OS with mint…
Well I mean for corporate use. Everything you use will be through a web browser and all the data will be stored on corporate servers.
Great job! Now it’s a good time to learn a bit of Ansible so you can keep your fleet up-to-date and configured. It would also come in handy in case you get a permit to do more conversions in the future.
I’ll look into it, thanks a bunch!
+1 for Ansible
- Install an application
- Do all the updates at the same time ( - after automating all the backups of course 😉)
- Removing games 😈
My son fell into a bad group of mostly straight A kids in middle school.
They collected a large collection of webpage based games. They started out attempting to host them on the schools network through shared docs etc. The IT guys wised up to them and shut it down.
Then they turned into 14 year olds and took it up a notch.
Got together and paid for a hosting location overseas. Built a video hosting webpage with thousands of pirated educational videos. Made a secondary menu without any links on the homepage. They have to type in the index page in the URL. All of the games pages show up as educational videos in the history.
Most of the teachers in the school are using the free educational videos so the webpage is on the trusted site on the school districts content filter.
The IT teacher at highschool figured it out. Instead of ratting them out and banning the webpage. He started working on getting them scholarships to colleges. Now most of the ringleaders have full ride scholarships.
My son was invited in because he is extremely good at games (unusually fast reaction times). He holds the high score on most of the games. I don’t play against the little shit. It’s pointless to try to beat him.
How does one get a job like this? This is great! I want to get a job in a school or university and infect it with linux. “Guys, look! It’s cheaper and we can set it up then pay for support which still makes it cheaper and students can learn how to use it on their computers too, since it’s freely available to them!”
I got this “job” completely by accident, which is funny considering it all started from me being so annoyed with using windows 8 on the computer thats assigned to me (while being so used to linux), life is truly a roller-coaster haha
