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submitted 1 day ago by Ace120C@sopuli.xyz to c/linux@lemmy.ml

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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[-] Samsy@lemmy.ml 10 points 1 day ago

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.

[-] lord_ryvan@ttrpg.network 15 points 1 day ago

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.

[-] Ace120C@sopuli.xyz 6 points 1 day ago

we dont have the K, just the regular, eitherway these were fastest computers (lenovo thinkcenter) we have, but there weren't many of em, most were with the i5 (HP Elitedesk G1)

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[-] Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Or they could just have been infected. Especially the ones on Windows 8, which has been EoL for over a year.

[-] The_Caretaker@lemm.ee 17 points 1 day ago

Bill Gates is responsible for Common Core which has enshitified the education systems of many states. Anything the schools do to stop giving money to Microsoft is a good move.

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[-] pineapple@lemmy.ml 16 points 1 day ago

That's an awesome story. If all your doing is browsing the Web or using applications that can easily and stably run on linux or have drop in replacements then linux would definitely be totally viable. On the other hand if you need to install specific proprietary applications and you have to rely on wine then maybe not.

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[-] bonnashejve@europe.pub 9 points 1 day ago

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

[-] Ace120C@sopuli.xyz 5 points 1 day ago

based, also I agree decentralized media is the best

its the based form of the internet

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[-] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 189 points 1 day ago

Woohoo, some hacker kid is about to install Sober and Prism and will be the hero for everyone.

My kid's elementary school has a computer club handling all the PCs. The other day they were surprised to hear that the PCs they were playing GCompris, Ktuberling, Pingus, Super Tux, Tuxpaint and Tux Kart on are running Linux.

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[-] Zink@programming.dev 26 points 1 day ago

Linux Mint is probably the perfect educational OS to switch to like that. I’m assuming most people are coming from Windows, are mouse+gui only, and are not used to being their own admin and installing all the basics like Firefox and libreoffice.

But it’s still Linux, so the user friendliness doesn’t mean you are locked out from going on tech or customization deep dives. Daily terminal user here, still love me some mint.

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[-] merde@sh.itjust.works 121 points 1 day ago

you're lucky to have an open-minded principle

[-] pulido@lemmings.world 53 points 1 day ago

Principal*

Not being pedantic, just thought I'd let you and others know there are multiple ways to spell this word.

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[-] SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.ml 25 points 1 day ago

But if you left tomorrow would they be able to admin them?

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[-] starstriker@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 points 1 day ago

It takes one technology inclined person to set it up, it's just takes another one to find a workaround, now the success of Linux in preventing gamers from doing their think depends on whether the second person decides to make the workaround known

[-] Ace120C@sopuli.xyz 9 points 1 day ago

yes but they will have to learn the OS, thats also a good thing

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[-] neon_nova@lemmy.dbzer0.com 27 points 1 day ago

Before I read the text, I was going to ask,

"Umm did they know you were doing it?" It would be funny if you just did it without asking leaving them wondering, "How the hell did this happen?"

[-] turtlesareneat@discuss.online 17 points 1 day ago

You know it's bad when Shadow IT starts migrating your inventories.

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[-] PumpkinSkink@lemmy.world 60 points 1 day ago

Just a funny story, but, I use an Ubuntu laptop as my work computer as a teacher, and once, while I was helping another student with work, a student opened my laptop and began trying to install Roblox. She got far enough to figure out it wouldn't work, and started searching for how to install it. When I came over she was trying to figure out how to set up Wine. She got pretty close to getting it working before I came over. I was secretly pretty impressed with how fast she figured it out. It couldn't have been more than a few minutes.

[-] Ace120C@sopuli.xyz 36 points 1 day ago

that's actually an interesting story, makes you wonder if kids nowadys do get exposed to linux first and not windows, would actually learn it faster than having to unlearn windows first?

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[-] markstos@lemmy.world 85 points 1 day ago

There is way to do this that works with even older computers and is easy to manage.

That’s with Edubuntu and thin-client computing using the Linux Terminal Server project, LTSP.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EdubuntuDocumentation/EdubuntuCookbook/Chapter_5_-_Thin-Client_Computing

In that model, you install Linux once on a server. Each computer in the lab is set to boot over the network from the server.

This way there is one computer to maintain, the users can’t access root and all the storage is centralized.

Even old computers with low CPU and RAM and no hard drive can make good thin clients.

A number of schools have been using this approach for 15+ years.

https://www.edubuntu.org/

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[-] bpev@lemmy.world 14 points 1 day ago

Focus on lessons instead of slacking, eh?

workstation013 is not in the sudoers file. 
This incident will be reported.
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[-] melroy@kbin.melroy.org 50 points 1 day ago

Linux was always ready for the education sector. I think already for 10 years now.

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[-] tehn00bi@lemmy.world 34 points 1 day ago

Linux over here being all environmental and shit.

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[-] Paddy66@lemmy.ml 66 points 1 day ago

lol I thought this was a guerrilla IT warfare post where you snuck in and did it, but you actually did it with permission.... 😂

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[-] gerdesj@lemmy.ml 23 points 1 day ago

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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[-] thirstyhyena@lemmy.world 20 points 1 day ago

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

[-] DragonOracleIX@lemmy.ml 3 points 23 hours ago

Give them easy access to .exe games??? They should have to put in the effort to slack off during class.

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[-] blayd@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 day ago

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!

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[-] Jumuta@sh.itjust.works 66 points 1 day ago

this is actually so insanely epic, good job!

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

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[-] 3dmvr@lemm.ee 12 points 1 day ago

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.

[-] Evotech@lemmy.world 10 points 1 day ago

But then the accidentally had to learn Linux, win win

[-] beveradb@lemm.ee 10 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

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 😅

[-] oo1@lemmings.world 12 points 1 day ago

One of them will, and the others will ape it.

Repeat this process enough times and more and more of them will get a bit better.

It's sort of like education; except the students are a bit better motivated.

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

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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[-] harcesz@szmer.info 4 points 1 day ago

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

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this post was submitted on 01 May 2025
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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