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I cannot for the life of me understand why public education institutions everywhere don't use Linux and open source software. For things like writing papers and

by yosito 4y ago

I cannot for the life of me understand why public education institutions everywhere don't use Linux and open source software. For things like writing papers and doing research, Linux is more than enough. Plus it would give students a head start into understanding how computers actually work, which is arguably the most crucial skill for students today.

microtonal 4y ago
For things like writing papers and doing research, Linux is more than enough. This is simply false. A lot of fields use specialized software that is only available on Windows and sometimes macOS. For instance, my wife works in neurolinguistics where most standard software for doing things like analyzing EEGs is for Windows. However, I agree that this may be true in other branches of education. E.g. in our daughter's primary school they use Chromebooks. They are used as glorified 'web terminals'. I can see why a mutable Linux distribution would be awful from a maintenance perspective, but an immutable Linux system like Fedora Silverblue would probably work as well as ChromeOS. This is also a failing of the Dutch government and the EU, leaving things to the market, rather than taking initiative and making a standardized education platform.
- alaric410 4y ago
  My field (theoretical physics) has the opposite problem. Almost all tools support only Linux but university infrastructure and incoming students are Linux-illiterate. A Linux strategy would greatly improve the quality of education.
jenny91 4y ago
Because Microsoft has spent billions on lobbying and spreading FUD in every educational institution and government across the world ranging from national to local governments to convince them that Windows and Office are the only usable suite of tools. So Word documents are now the lingua franca in the office.
- EUROCARE 4y ago
  Well, once upon a time, I decided to break through the FUD, and convinced my local school to try teaching on Linux. Problem is, after three months of work, I wasn't able to reliably deploy the OS to a room of computers and connect it to the school network - even though I worked as a Linux server admin before that. Every single computer (all the same, with serial number one after the other) had a different set of issues that made it completely unusable. Many of ones I got kinda working got broken after a few rounds of updates. Windows just worked right after installation. The year of Linux desktop is still not there.
  - dijit 4y ago
    Interesting. Took me 20 minutes to fire up an installation of 50 machines in a company in 2012. Those machines ran without fault for multiple years until I had to add some additional support for caching the NFS mounts because we had added so many clients after the initial installation that we were overloading our NAS. No hardware errors for sure. But these were desktops (not of uniform origin). Windows machines on the other hand were a bit more painful, every single one had to be hand enrolled to the sambav4 “AD” (we didn’t have AD) and the instructions never worked the same way twice. So annoying.
    - EUROCARE 4y ago
      My own desktop also works like a charm with Linux, but that changes nothing about the problems I encountered at the school. Yeah I can imagine that not having AD makes things more complicated, but once you have it, it works very well on Windows. Not being able to reliably connect to AD was one of the failures I had with this classroom.
      - dijit 4y ago
        It’s a really unfortunate set of circumstances that you need to run a Microsoft product for authentication in order to have a reasonable experience with the Microsoft operating system. Especially because that Microsoft product (AD) is usually the hardest thing to integrate with from other operating systems; and is contingent on owning all user accounts (and usually means you have to use their email systems and file sharing systems). Quite a lot of lock-in for a base level of user experience. But I guess that’s OK if you are a shareholder. :)

by yosito 4y ago

microtonal 4y ago

For things like writing papers and doing research, Linux is more than enough. This is simply false. A lot of fields use specialized software that is only available on Windows and sometimes macOS. For instance, my wife works in neurolinguistics where most standard software for doing things like analyzing EEGs is for Windows. However, I agree that this may be true in other branches of education. E.g. in our daughter's primary school they use Chromebooks. They are used as glorified 'web terminals'. I can see why a mutable Linux distribution would be awful from a maintenance perspective, but an immutable Linux system like Fedora Silverblue would probably work as well as ChromeOS. This is also a failing of the Dutch government and the EU, leaving things to the market, rather than taking initiative and making a standardized education platform.

alaric410 4y ago
My field (theoretical physics) has the opposite problem. Almost all tools support only Linux but university infrastructure and incoming students are Linux-illiterate. A Linux strategy would greatly improve the quality of education.

jenny91 4y ago

Because Microsoft has spent billions on lobbying and spreading FUD in every educational institution and government across the world ranging from national to local governments to convince them that Windows and Office are the only usable suite of tools. So Word documents are now the lingua franca in the office.

EUROCARE 4y ago
Well, once upon a time, I decided to break through the FUD, and convinced my local school to try teaching on Linux. Problem is, after three months of work, I wasn't able to reliably deploy the OS to a room of computers and connect it to the school network - even though I worked as a Linux server admin before that. Every single computer (all the same, with serial number one after the other) had a different set of issues that made it completely unusable. Many of ones I got kinda working got broken after a few rounds of updates. Windows just worked right after installation. The year of Linux desktop is still not there.
- dijit 4y ago
  Interesting. Took me 20 minutes to fire up an installation of 50 machines in a company in 2012. Those machines ran without fault for multiple years until I had to add some additional support for caching the NFS mounts because we had added so many clients after the initial installation that we were overloading our NAS. No hardware errors for sure. But these were desktops (not of uniform origin). Windows machines on the other hand were a bit more painful, every single one had to be hand enrolled to the sambav4 “AD” (we didn’t have AD) and the instructions never worked the same way twice. So annoying.
  - EUROCARE 4y ago
    My own desktop also works like a charm with Linux, but that changes nothing about the problems I encountered at the school. Yeah I can imagine that not having AD makes things more complicated, but once you have it, it works very well on Windows. Not being able to reliably connect to AD was one of the failures I had with this classroom.
    - dijit 4y ago
      It’s a really unfortunate set of circumstances that you need to run a Microsoft product for authentication in order to have a reasonable experience with the Microsoft operating system. Especially because that Microsoft product (AD) is usually the hardest thing to integrate with from other operating systems; and is contingent on owning all user accounts (and usually means you have to use their email systems and file sharing systems). Quite a lot of lock-in for a base level of user experience. But I guess that’s OK if you are a shareholder. :)