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.

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.

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.

Linux has been ready for education for a long time! Most of the public high school machines I interacted with in the mid 2000s were linux based. There was a dedicated Mac lab for creative work.

Using Linux in the university back in 2004 helped make the jump to Linux at home and I have been using it for 20 years now.

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

Beautiful work .... I wish my school had done that when I was a kid.

The great thing about it is that now you are helping to generate a new crop of kids who will learn how to use Linux. Sure, they will try to do stupid things on it like install games or figure out how to bypass things or install or uninstall ... the great thing about that is that they will learn how to use the system in order to try to break it. It's the same way I learned how to use Linux and probably the same way you learned how to use it.

You've advanced the computer department for those kids more than you know.

Focus on lessons instead of slacking, eh?

workstation013 is not in the sudoers file. 
This incident will be reported.

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)

Minecraft Java Edition runs natively in Linux. But kids these days are probably playing Bedrock... chumps.

That’s super awesome

Buuuut my guest gaming machine is a 4670k machine and I can confirm that not only does Windows 10 run very smoothly on it, but it also runs most modern games at 60+FPS! CPU-bound games can struggle. We finally got my partner a new computer and made that one the guest machine when Persona 5 went from 80FPS down to 5FPS when they got off the train hahaha

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.

Liberation

This is great for a handful of devices but I deploy and administrate hundreds of devices at my school. As much as I would love to, there's no way I could sell this without a really robust way of managing device policies & software deployment. I understand RHEL has something like that but that it isn't quite up to the same standard as the Microsoft admin ecosystem just yet.

Don't forget to test updates and make timeshift backups when needed, I never had a bad update but it really helps.

You have turned Roblox/Minecraft loving little kids into a lifelong Linux haters. 🤣

I applaud you.

PS: So how are the computers performing now?

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.

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.