I too dropped out of school because of Linux. Mandrake quickly led me down the rabbit hole to Gentoo where I got to learn how operating systems actually work h

I too dropped out of school because of Linux. Mandrake quickly led me down the rabbit hole to Gentoo where I got to learn how operating systems actually work hands on by tuning and building my own from source. My college was still trying to teach me that no computer needs more than 64MB of memory (misquoting bill gates), and the CS teachers didn't understand computers enough to use anything but windows XP. I dropped out and continued learning software engineering, sysadmin, and security engineering on my own. Three topics no college had any current or relevant courses on at the time. Dell was right to steer people towards operating systems that give users freedom. A subset of those users will take advantage of that freedom to learn far more about technology than their coursework will cover. Will that make them different? Will being different require them to solve more problems themselves and rely less on others? Yes and Yes. That is a feature, not a bug.