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.)
I believe soon will a kid learn to install roblox、Minecraft and teach other kids ☠️
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 rightz my bad I’m dumb
I don’t think that at all (c:
If you had installed bazzite those kids would worship you
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’d have good control of 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!
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!
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.
You just taught the next generation about compatibility layers! Well done my man
thanks!
Would Edubuntu be a better fit?
I love Linux. I’m running Linux and love the experience.
But…
i7-4970i7-4790 so running windows 10 with all its bloat was not going to be an easy task for emWhat in the world are you talking about, man??
Even ignoring the silliness of the “bloat” - i7-4790 eats Win10 alive and asks for seconds.
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
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?
does this mean linux now is ready for the education sector?
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.
You are doing the lords work and I ain’t even a christian
Now I want to attend your school!
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.
Don’t distros like ubuntu and fedora tie into active directory pretty cleanly anymore? You could use your schools existing infrastructure with linux clients
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.
based
That’s pretty cool !
If I had to do this myself, I would probably choose NixOS, so that I could write up a config on one of the PCs, and the deploy the exact same thing on every single one and be certain the build is perfectly reproduced.
Though I’m sure there are similar tools for other distros, but that’s what I know.
I considered it but prinicipal said no its “too hard” for them, maybe next time
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.
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. You have to grind these memories you know