this post was submitted on 01 May 2025
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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.)

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[–] gerdesj@lemmy.ml 23 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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

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[–] Jumuta@sh.itjust.works 70 points 1 day ago (2 children)

this is actually so insanely epic, good job!

pretty cool of the principal too to allow you to do stuff like this

[–] sparky@lemmy.federate.cc 12 points 1 day ago

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.

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[–] thirstyhyena@lemmy.world 19 points 1 day ago (4 children)

Next step is to teach the students WINE. ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ

[–] Ace120C@sopuli.xyz 16 points 1 day ago

I'll let them figure that out themselves xddd

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[–] blayd@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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!

[–] Ace120C@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

oh I see, well I'll see what happens in like a month

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[–] TrickDacy@lemmy.world 30 points 1 day ago (1 children)
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[–] 3dmvr@lemm.ee 12 points 1 day ago (3 children)

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.

[–] beveradb@lemm.ee 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

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 😅

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[–] ColdWater@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Now students got addicted to linux ricing instead of games, jk good job op and the principal is nice for letting you do that.

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[–] electric_nan@lemmy.ml 46 points 1 day ago (4 children)

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!)

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[–] harcesz@szmer.info 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Used to run a whole small highschool on Linux Mint, worked pretty well.

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[–] termaxima@programming.dev 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] WhatsHerBucket@lemmy.world 23 points 1 day ago (9 children)

.. And this is how you land in IT work

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[–] Otiz@sopuli.xyz 7 points 1 day ago (8 children)
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[–] OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 13 points 1 day ago

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)

[–] ohshit604@sh.itjust.works 36 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

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.

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[–] debil@lemmy.world 19 points 1 day ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] ayyy@sh.itjust.works 25 points 1 day ago (11 children)

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.

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[–] CapriciousDay@lemmy.ml 17 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] Tattorack@lemmy.world 31 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Cool story bro.

Except the story is actually cool, and you're a real bro!

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