I swapped the entire school computers to linux mint
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.)
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 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...
haha, I think I got a worldwide high score at the time, or at was close to one back then.
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 ?
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?
Nice. In what year(s) did you have your first computer?
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.
I think most kids these days like to play bedrock edition, so it will be harder anyways.
Theres a flatpak for that.
you're lucky to have an open-minded principle
Principal*
Not being pedantic, just thought I'd let you and others know there are multiple ways to spell this word.
I will be pedantic. There is only one way to spell each word; principal and principle are different words (though they share a root).
I was afraid someone would do that.
Both can be correct
true, normally people would be too afraid
They're often having to juggle with very low budgets, old equipment, low skill and zero support. And that's before you add children...
I don't doubt they jumped at the chance of someone helping out.
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.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EdubuntuDocumentation/EdubuntuCookbook/Chapter_5_-_Thin-Client_Computing
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.
https://www.edubuntu.org/
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.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/SDL-Merges-Wayland-Multi-Seat
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.
lol I thought this was a guerrilla IT warfare post where you snuck in and did it, but you actually did it with permission.... 😂
yeah, I don't want trouble xD
Could you imagine the stories that would circulate in the playgrounds? "I heard the Linux fairy is close. Timmy can't play Roblox in class anymore."
Spread anarchy! ...os.
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
Yes. I started really using windows in 2020 and linux in 2022 and linux still felt simpler to use.
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.
Teh kidz r al rite.
this is actually so insanely epic, good job!
pretty cool of the principal too to allow you to do stuff like this
ikr, didn't expect him to agree
Seconding the last part. When I was in high school, the admins wouldn’t approve most after school clubs, or students displaying their artwork. Here this admin is encouraging their students’ curiosity and talents, while letting the students have real impact in their school. Grade A stuff right there.
Linux was always ready for the education sector. I think already for 10 years now.
fair enough, I just hope at some point schools and organizations switches to the cool penguin.
Back in my days I was also disappointed that schools weren't using Linux. So I totally agree with you.
It was ready since day one. Linus wrote Linux while a student at the University of Helsinki. It was inspired by MINIX, which was also targeted for use in schools.
When I heard about schools using Chromebooks literally the first thing I said was "Linux can do more than a Chromebook can and is free, why the hell aren't they using that?!" Linux running on the cheapest OEM laptop (make sure you get ones without the prepaid Windows license so you don't spend more than you need to) is a better experience than the most expensive Chromebook.
The user experience is not as important as the management tooling.
My highschool used Ubuntu exclusively back in 2010
This is a great story, and you should be really proud of yourself! Good job :). I used Linux through college and had very few issues (that I can remember!)
thanks, mind telling me what were those issues? I'm kinda curious, perhaps I should have a mental note for those if they are related to what I just did
It's been too long, but seems like I had some problems with formatting getting wrecked between Word and LibreOffice. It probably works a lot better now, not to mention that you can just access Word in the browser if really necessary.
ahhhhh okay yeah I agree, my friend (who is also a long time linux user as much as I am one as well) does complain a bit about word processing apps on linux and I quote "basic word processing works alright on linux with libreoffice and onlyoffice, but once you put advanced stuff in it, its a bit difficult to work with", he seemed to have problems with docx files (iirc) so he has a windows VM where he uses MS office for stuff that he is required to work on, and continue to use linux for everything else.
I used Linux in university also, and actually had LESS problems than my classmates - a few of our textbooks came with "homework" versions of industry software (made by the textbook writer, just coded to be good enough to learn some basic concepts and work with some provided example files) and for reasons unknown to man and beast, most of them worked better on wine than on Windows natively - for one, the "submit" button was basically off-screen on Windows but placed where you'd expect on wine, on another trying to connect to machines was a HUGE pain.... Except the Linux networking interface had no issues haha.
I only switched because the forced upgrade to Windows 8 ate my first year midterm essays and I never forgave it.
Linux over here being all environmental and shit.
real lmao
And if they learn about wine and lutris and manage to install Roblox, they'll probably get more out of it than by listening to the class in the first place !
I learned so much by circumventing the school security stuff. I probably wouldn't be in IT if not for the parental control limitations and school network blocks
I don’t know how developed your school system is but, I would advise the principal into blocking the websites via DNS that way the computers won’t resolve them.
AdGuard, PiHole, OpenSense are free open source DNS resolvers however, chances are your school already manages its own DNS so I would obviously consult with them first.
Idk tbh, but the principal seems experienced I think, he might figure it out
Hey OP, regarding Minecraft: It's a Java program that uses OpenGL for rendering. Therefore it's not a Windows game, but inherently cross platform. Here's the official .deb package https://launcher.mojang.com/download/Minecraft.deb
Roblox in the trash AHAHAHAHA
Beautiful effort!!
yeah! was funny to me too!
I've actually been using linux with older customers for years. It solves several problems. First, it lets them get more life out of their older machines. Second, its free. Third, the kind of malware that targets linux systems isnt really a factor for little old man on facebook. Finally, when scammers call, they cant establish credibility with my customers. They get in, remote access barely works thanks to wayland not liking their tools yet. The entire system looks different and the commands are different so they dont understand how it works but the customer does. So the scam falls apart where they try to prove they know what they are talking about because they cant use the terminal properly. It always ends the same way. My customers get suspicious and say "I'm going to call my computer guy" and the hang up.
This trick has been successful for years and my users are very happy not to have to deal with microsoft's bullshit. The fact that it confuses the hell out of scammers is just a nice bonus.
You just taught the next generation about compatibility layers! Well done my man
Cool story bro.
Except the story is actually cool, and you're a real bro!
thanks man, you're a real bro too!
Linux Mint is probably the perfect educational OS to switch to like that. I’m assuming most people are coming from Windows, are mouse+gui only, and are not used to being their own admin and installing all the basics like Firefox and libreoffice.
But it’s still Linux, so the user friendliness doesn’t mean you are locked out from going on tech or customization deep dives. Daily terminal user here, still love me some mint.
I'm a noon to Linux but I still love using terminal to download apps and stuff because it just looks cool. ASCII makes me feel like I know my way around computers but I'm just installing Firefox lol
exactly! that's why I picked it xd
I love it. Way to go!
thanks a lot!
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
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.
Nagato Yuki moment
ah the days were kenny used to shit post. Good days
When I was in high school, computers had Deep Freeze setup, because kids would constantly break the OS and download malware. It's a software that resets the C drive to a known state on every reboot. You might consider using something similar on classroom workstations.
Also, it might be worth learning about network booting, automating the Linux installer and ansible to install things on every machine at once and automate configuration work.
my school also had windows with deep freeze before they malfunctioned or smth iirc from what principal told me
I love Linux. I'm running Linux and love the experience.
But...
What in the world are you talking about, man??
Even ignoring the silliness of the "bloat" - i7-4790 eats Win10 alive and asks for seconds.
So... No, you didn't stop them from doing that. All it takes for them to get back to playing games is to google "linux roblox how to" and 20 minutes later they're good to go. Windows has AppLocker, and GPO to prevent running unwanted software - have you researched alternatives for Linux?
Well, depends on scale. The setup you did is fine for, what, a single classroom? Two classrooms? It's completely unusable for a larger school - for that you need an MDM solution, ideally with some form of IAM. In the Windows world that's SCCM/Intune with AD/EID (local/cloud). Correct me if I'm wrong, but there's only bare-bones equivalents in the Linux world for that, which would be the bigger a problem the larger a school you'd be dealing with.
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.
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).
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.
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!
.. And this is how you land in IT work
I'll be definitely cool if I somehow land such job lol
That's definitely something that goes into your resume and should be mentioned in interviews if you ever pursue that line of work.
good idea, I will keep that in mind.
Definitely ask your principal for a recommendation.
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.
You will regret it in 500 years though.
I was forced to learn Bloatscript (JS) cant get any worse than this lolololol xd
Nicely done! That’s pretty awesome :)
Though I should point out that it’s also not hard to lock down a windows install a bit more if you don’t make the default account an admin one. But moving to Linux is better imo for a whole host of reasons.
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!
Sweet.
I would have gone with Fedora in order to deploy FreeIPA for an Active Directory equivalent, but this is a good start.
I choose mint cuz it was approachable to newbies so yeah, I myself run opensuse (and used to run arch/void)
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
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.
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.
Give them easy access to .exe games??? They should have to put in the effort to slack off during class.
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
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.
Linux has been ready for some time within various educational programs, but maybe you are referring to relatively early education curriculum in public schools? The general anecdotes I've heard from teachers within a variety of grade levels in the USA (mostly elementary and high school levels, but some doctoral engineering/scientific as well) convey that the largest hurdles to overcome are:
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.
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!
With fydeOS (or flex) you can now convert any PC or Mac to a Chromebook , that's a good option for schools now imo
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)
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
agreed!
Linux has been ready for education for a long time! Most of the public high school machines I interacted with in the mid 2000s were linux based. There was a dedicated Mac lab for creative work.
oh I see, good to know!
Little side note
The i7-4790K is still quite powerful, so I'm pretty sure this wasn't the problem, at all. Perhaps they're running on an HDD, have little RAM, or you got the CPU wrong.
You can see the CPU and RAM by launching System Info from tbf start menu, and see if it's running on an SSD or HDD by launching Disks from the menu.
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
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.
Well done! Protip: You can use double new lines to format paragraphs. And full-stops.
Germany already moved their tech stack to FOSS alternatives for their government assigned computers!
there is actual progress that's being made 🥳
Beautiful work .... I wish my school had done that when I was a kid.
The great thing about it is that now you are helping to generate a new crop of kids who will learn how to use Linux. Sure, they will try to do stupid things on it like install games or figure out how to bypass things or install or uninstall ... the great thing about that is that they will learn how to use the system in order to try to break it. It's the same way I learned how to use Linux and probably the same way you learned how to use it.
You've advanced the computer department for those kids more than you know.
This reminds me of when I was a kid. My school computer were running slow as heck windows xps or windows 7s, mostly slow because the bloat of education software that was installed to block visiting certain websites, lock down computers during certain hours or when the teacher is lecturing, etc. Even in my high school.
One day for my computer class during a lecture, I plugged in my liveboot USB running Mint, hushed my classmates next to me and rebooted. I didn't expect the computer to make a loud as hell beep sound when it got to the bootloader, but I was sitting in a side row so the teacher just said "what was that?" and moved on while others looked at me suspiciously. But then I was able to boot up Linux right there, super easy. And everything works, I was able to browse the web without any restrictions, well I'm not really trying to look at bad stuff but just hate being locked down when I can do something else instead. Or maybe I just wanted to show off Linux. Anyways my classmates next to me silently whispered "what the heck how did you do this??" I look back at this as a fond memory.
all I can say is: based.
true tbh, I do wish linux takes on MacOS in marketshare and beat it at least (I know beating windows atm is a pipe dream, but MacOS seems realistic atm)
I used to make bash scripts to either create infinite terminal and crash my classmates PC or use text to speech in bash or loop closing and openind dvd reader :p
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.
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!
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.
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
That's an awesome story. If all your doing is browsing the Web or using applications that can easily and stably run on linux or have drop in replacements then linux would definitely be totally viable. On the other hand if you need to install specific proprietary applications and you have to rely on wine then maybe not.
luckily its just VSCode, so I didnt have to install something thats too hard!
yes (they need to be in the wheel group)
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)
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!
sweet!
I wanna build my own computer, but Ive been putting it down because of life and stuff, been very busy these past 2 years bit I'll eventually find time to do it!
oh you doing P3R too? very nice! you'll enjoy it I think, happy peace distrubing lol xd
Don't forget to test updates and make timeshift backups when needed, I never had a bad update but it really helps.
A delayed update schedule really helps for environments like this. Keep your ear to the ground for critical updates, but I've done this sort of thing a few times and waiting a week or two to update is a really great solution.
One thing I've almost done before is to choose a computer as a test subject, update it before anything else, and if all things are good you're probably fine.
I shall offer this to the principal, thanks for reminding me!
yeah i'm thinking that if you want you might be able to wrangle this into a semi permanent job
Lol a kid can google how to install games on linux, just need one to do it and teach the others, I used to bring games on a usb to play on macs through wine through the school lan, eventually I put them in some random folder on the school network, it didnt delete it til like the last day of school my senior year, wed copy the games to our computers and delete them at the end of class.
But then the accidentally had to learn Linux, win win
You overestimate the technical competence and attention span of the current generation of kids - they barely know how to use a mouse.
IMO if any kid these days manages to do enough work to figure out how to do anything on Linux, they're probably well ahead of the pack and deserve to play their game as a reward 😅
One of them will, and the others will ape it.
Repeat this process enough times and more and more of them will get a bit better.
It's sort of like education; except the students are a bit better motivated.
this tbh, thank you for saying what I had in mind lol
Back when I was in high school I remember hearing about other students that would store games on certain teachers shared folders on the network. I can't remember if the school ever caught on to that.
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
You have turned Roblox/Minecraft loving little kids into a lifelong Linux haters. 🤣
I applaud you.
PS: So how are the computers performing now?
Minecraft runs natively on Linux, so it won't take them long to figure that out.
well, the ones that do figure it out, they earned their game session, that would lowkey force them to learn linux, which is good tbh
Just install Luanti and that will take care of the Minecraft group.
Exceptionally well actually!
Once they figure out chatgpt can walk them through the process of installation, it becomes easy to learn and I bet they will become linux lovers.
Liberation
For such a setup I think it Is a good idea to look in to freeipa/idm. Would make management a load more easy. centralized account control and being able to sit at any PC and login with your own credentials is one of the many benefits.
Did the same some years ago. It was for the gap between win7 and 10.
Everyone told me it was the best productive time. Because users can't install stuff and my network blocked a lot of dumb shit.
But now we got new win 11 PCs and every user is back on solitaire or shady websites.
This is great! The science teacher who used to also look after all the computers at my school was a big fan of the Acorn Archimedes/RISC PC (quite standard school computers in my day due to the BBC computer literacy stuff, where Acorn won the contract for the BBC Micro). We had a couple of PCs (RM Nimbus) which didn't get as much use. I believe the plan was to switch over to PCs running Windows (95 had been out a couple of years) and because of that he left. I wonder if there was a viable alternative at that point, such as Linux, that he would have stayed.
windows 95 and RICS PCs....this makes me feel nostalgic....
I am old.
same (I might still be younger than you though....but I was definitely using 95 back when it was new, however I was very young then)
I had dual booted Ubuntu with Windows when I was in college, without having any prior exposure to Linux or any skill in coding or even scripting. The install itself was incredibly easy and I was wondering why more kids don't do it. All the core functions that a computer was supposed to, Ubuntu was doing it better than Windows save one - running windows specific software.
I guess Linux was good enough for education back then itself, but it ddn't run fancy games and I could not convince anyone else to dual boot their PC.
ah fair enough
The issues are probably gonna pop up when teachers and students bring incompatible ms office documents from home, and start complaining. Excel is the one I have run in to most, not always being compatible with libreoffice.
we are a programming school we dont use word processing software, however as for the teachers, we decided to keep windows for them
Is there not some kind of RMM software you could be using to install the same setup on all of them simultaneously? How about monitoring? Firewalls?
Would Edubuntu be a better fit?
This is awesome. I hope the students don't start enjoying xbill :p
I looked up xbill and this looks fun, I might try it on my computer actually! thanks btw
Lol, blast from the past...
I was thinking of Pop!_OS but also heard about NixOS that could be even run on Mid-2012 MacBook Pro.
Any software in Linux can be used in education, as long as the schools invest the time:
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
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.
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.
Them paying you is so nice! I remember installing Ubuntu in some computer in high school before I even used Linux myself lol
ikr, didn't expect that, perhaps they saw me spending so much time on that so they felt bad or smth
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.
There are plenty of Minecraft launchers in the flatpak store so you might wanna make sure they're not taking advantage of that lol
if they know what flatpak is anyways! however good point lol
Well it's literally the app named "software" and this is a programming school so someone's bound to find out
true but then they have to know the sudo password to install such apps, unless the teachers, the principal or me tell them that, I doubt they'll be successful but hey you do still raise a good point and I shall probably discuss this with the principal
You generally don't need sudo to install flatpaks and actually pretty sure they advise against it.
for us mint always asks for it, so if you dont type it, it'll just not install it, idk tbh
Actually, for flatpaks specifically, even by the software manager it won't ask for root privileges and go straight to installing
Check up on it, that's my experience at least and I've got my own laptop running the latest version of Linux Mint. It could be some change in config you've done
I have school on saturday so I will post an update here if I remember (hopefully I do)
Can't you just change this in the BIOS?
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
Why did you pick Mint?
this, people who are afraid of new things won't pick something thats too different to windows
I allways wonder why its mint and not kde, which seems more mature and even more like windows.
I know. Mint mostly stands for the cinnamon desktop. If you choose mint for another, you probably just can use the specific ubuntu spin or even debian itself.
Mint also gets rid of Snaps.
There is a KDE distro, KDE neon
You fucking rock!! Keep up the good work!
thanks dude!
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!"
Anti Commercial-AI license
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
Yoo that's wild man doing gods (Richard Stallman) work here man.
Great initiative nonetheless. Compared to 8 this much more secure and for programming it's a great choice too. Bringing more life out of some old PCs, saving a school money, and forcing some kids to get creative in order to play Roblox.
As for is it ready fr this application, programming, it has been for a while. For general, especially web based, applications it absolutely is. Of course, there are quite few things were it's just not but for the most part Linux is a great choice.
thanks, gotta push GNU/Linux a bit higher in marketshare huh xd
Sober (flatpak) should work for Roblox :) it uses the Android version with some fixes, signing in was a little jank when I tried it but after that flawless!
😠
* Angry in 20 year old Edubuntu *
windows 8 is 13 years old.....
13 years old is ancient to you?
My mouse is older than that...
idk, windows 8 is super dated to me as it tried so hard to appeal to the tablet crowd, however dated or not this wasn't the point of the post....
Wish I could do that when my school computers had Dos and Turbo Pascal. Ah, the good old himem.sys times. Miles better than W11.
Used to run a whole small highschool on Linux Mint, worked pretty well.
Now students got addicted to linux ricing instead of games, jk good job op and the principal is nice for letting you do that.
Now I want to attend your school!
Nice work, you did a good thing 😊
thank you!
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
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 right my bad I'm dumb
I don't think that at all (c:
Is there something that has to be done first (like Windows generalization)?
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 have good control over 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!
If you had installed bazzite those kids would worship you
true lmaoooo
I can’t imagine many schools will adopt Linux unless they can do enterprise management across the devices
This post reminded me of year 7, and spending like 3 or more hours with the school tech getting their shitty Education Queensland spyware to function on Linux Mint. Next thing was circumnavigating the web filter, and getting Wine to run 😂
bruh....lmaoo, luckily for me it was just VScode and thats it lol
That's awesome! And yeah, Linux Mint was a great choice. I assume you will be asked to do maintenance on these computers, and there should generally be less maintenance involved with Mint than other distros. And since it's a programming school, linux would be way better than windows. 👍
Now you go with veyon?
You are doing the lords work and I ain't even a christian
Nice! One step at a time.
yes!
I believe soon will a kid learn to install roblox、Minecraft and teach other kids ☠️
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
1: You sure you had the right permission to do so?
??? He said he talked to the principal multiple times
ummm yes?
Cool but why do you ask the teachers? Without asking anyone would be way more funny and more interesting to see what happens
It’s the sort of school gags that people reminisce 20 years later when they sit with their family near cozy fireplace with a pipe of tobacco or crochet
You need to score all the silly memories while you still can.
People, remember the most important when you are young is to have fun. The responsibility and adulting will come for you anyway. You don’t want to be ‚mature for your age’. Have a heckin blast and take no prisoners
If I could go back in time I would spread custom furry uwumaxxed ransomware that would unlock with trollish gimmick through the school network. But when I got this good with computers I was already at uni so such things lost their luster.
Nowadays I would rather work in security and pentesting and get substantial amount of the adult green paper risk free. We get so boring with age don’t we. There’s nothing more boring than being a good, law obeying citizen but it is what it is if you have half a brain. You can always buy some expensive drugs or become motorsport adrenaline junkie
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.