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:

1. Teaching the teachers. Teachers are usually very smart and capable, but are often chronically overworked, overstressed, and underpaid for their labor. They have limited mental bandwidth in learning new tech workflows while having the added obligation of teaching these workflows to students which may be at an attention/interest deficit.
2. Challenging the status quo at the administrative level. Schools often receive incentives, grants, steep discounts, etc, for installing certain types of hardware or software packages. The software baselines of some schools are restricted at the district level; many public libraries are restricted by the city/county. Perhaps the best approach here is to install Linux as a "secondary" option (similar to how a smaller number of e.g. Macs may be installed in a computer lab comprised mostly of Windows computers) until it's more widely adopted.
3. Advocating for equivalent Linux support for popular proprietary software. This is especially true for the creative design community, such as graphic design and professional music production. Adobe is usually the target of criticism here; Linux does not currently hold enough market share to capture Adobe's attention while their patrons usually have unwavering brand loyalty or are unwilling to make any tooling/workflow compromises as to maintain their livelihood.
4. FOSS-friendly awareness campaigns. Showing people that they can remain productive while not being at the mercy of Big Tech. Not using public funds for private industry.
5. Feature parity case studies compared to proprietary options.
6. Overcoming the stereotype that Linux is only for techy people, shrouded by gatekeepers, or subject to drama/infighting.

Now I want to attend your school!

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.

Liberation

I love Linux. I'm running Linux and love the experience.

But...

~~i7-4970~~ i7-4790 so running windows 10 with all its bloat was not going to be an easy task for em

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.

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.

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.

Well done! Protip: You can use double new lines to format paragraphs. And full-stops.

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 are doing the lords work and I ain't even a christian

You just taught the next generation about compatibility layers! Well done my man

so my question here would be: does this mean linux now is ready for the education sector?

No, not for elementary/HS. You have to understand that schools aren't regular users. They will have 2 top priorities:

1. Hardware vender support. There isn't any vendor that can/does support the volume and pricing that a school will do. While some major vendors are starting to offer Linux pre-installed, they aren't apart of their educational vendor options.
2. They need to have a "drag and drop" security suite. Schools don't have large/well skilled IT department, so they rely on security suites that "tick off all the boxes". This allows them an excuse is suddenly little Timmy has porn on their school computers. (This is one of those reasons ChromeOS is becoming so popular. They can issue a device, have the student only have a Google Workspace for Education account, and then walk away. Easy and simple. And yes, there are many websites that can tell you how to get around it, but then the school gets to turn around and claim the student "hacked" it and is in violation of rules X, Y, and Z to which the parent can also be held responsible.)

Until these two issues are solved, Linux won't be ready for the public education sector. (When the parent issues the device, all rules are gone since it's up to the parent what limits to place, and all the school will say is that the device must be able to run programs X, Y, and Z.)

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

Would Edubuntu be a better fit?

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

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.

Are you now the IT support guy for these workstations, or is the school's IT going to take over maintenance. I guess you have an internship or something if you are.

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.

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.

When I studied in university - all our computer classes were running Linux, and it was many years ago! Linux proved its effectiveness. When we had russian cyber attack on our banks (virus Petya)- our bank system survived thanks to Linux). Nowadays when twitter, facebook chose nazism - there is only one option to go to decentralized media

Little side note

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

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.

Roblox in the trash AHAHAHAHA

Beautiful effort!!