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.)
I love it. Way to go!
thanks a lot!
Nice! One step at a time.
yes!
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
oh dang, that changes everything
Well for a .deb, the users would need sudo access.
Actually it’s just an archive. It can be easily extracted using
dpkg -x *.deb ~/.localfor example.TIL but that makes sense. What else would it be. It also contains some setup logic that is executed when installing, right? I wonder whether the launcher would just work like that
You’re right, apparently amongst other things there are some hooks that are ran during the package’s lifecycle in something that is called the control archive.
I was today years old when I realized I can install packages non-privelaged if I leverage ~/.local/
So long as /home isn’t noexec.
How would I check that?
Edit: actually, Lemme just rtfm
Don’t forget to test updates and make timeshift backups when needed, I never had a bad update but it really helps.
I shall offer this to the principal, thanks for reminding me!
yeah i’m thinking that if you want you might be able to wrangle this into a semi permanent job
A delayed update schedule really helps for environments like this. Keep your ear to the ground for critical updates, but I’ve done this sort of thing a few times and waiting a week or two to update is a really great solution.
One thing I’ve almost done before is to choose a computer as a test subject, update it before anything else, and if all things are good you’re probably fine.
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.
I’ll look into it, thanks a bunch!
+1 for Ansible
- Install an application
- Do all the updates at the same time ( - after automating all the backups of course 😉)
- Removing games 😈
My son fell into a bad group of mostly straight A kids in middle school.
They collected a large collection of webpage based games. They started out attempting to host them on the schools network through shared docs etc. The IT guys wised up to them and shut it down.
Then they turned into 14 year olds and took it up a notch.
Got together and paid for a hosting location overseas. Built a video hosting webpage with thousands of pirated educational videos. Made a secondary menu without any links on the homepage. They have to type in the index page in the URL. All of the games pages show up as educational videos in the history.
Most of the teachers in the school are using the free educational videos so the webpage is on the trusted site on the school districts content filter.
The IT teacher at highschool figured it out. Instead of ratting them out and banning the webpage. He started working on getting them scholarships to colleges. Now most of the ringleaders have full ride scholarships.
My son was invited in because he is extremely good at games (unusually fast reaction times). He holds the high score on most of the games. I don’t play against the little shit. It’s pointless to try to beat him.
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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Feature parity case studies compared to proprietary options.
- Overcoming the stereotype that Linux is only for techy people, shrouded by gatekeepers, or subject to drama/infighting.
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
oh haha I see, I’ve been using linux for 5 years so far and I have been ONLY gaming on linux, I have ditched windows for good, this switch was very easy to me cuz I dont have any windows specfic apps/games dependency, everything I want is there, and the ones that aren’t, there are alternatives that are the same or better than the apps I’ve used on windows!
Oh and I should specify my old guest machine does have 16GB of RAM, solid state drives, and an RTX2070, so it’s probably a bit better equipped than school machines hahaha
great specs! I have a slightly underpowered computer compared to yours, R5 5600H and RX6500M, and I’m also a persona fan, great series tbh, my favorite is persona 4, its the most fun game to me in the series so far, rn I’m playing through P3 Reload!
Oooo nice! My partner has the best machine in the house now, since they always got my hand-me-downs and never a brand new machine. We built it about a year ago, so it’s got a 12600k, 32GB RAM, a 3070, 3TB SSD space, and 4TB HDD. Mine’s not terribly far from that, but I am a little envious hahaha
Ooo and yah, I’m doing P3R after P5!
Ugh I would love to switch solely to Linux but I have ONE GAME that I play online with friends that’s an incredibly ridiculous install process and it is impossible to run on Linux without issues. It’s amazing that it even runs on Windows nowadays. (The Specialists, a mod for the original Half Life.)
you could play with a VM with GPU pass-through or have a seperate computer running windows made JUST to play that game (if you are wealthy enough), however these are merely suggestions, and it’s always up to you
Nahhh thank you, hahaha. My other machines are Linux, we just keep our high end gaming machines on Windows. That older computer with the 4670k is getting Pop! OS when I get around to it.
ah okay understood, fair enough, also PopOS is pretty good, cosmic is coming up pretty nicely, might give it a try when it gets to stable branch!
Now you go with veyon?
Man seriously aren’t you happy with the 2% of users that use Linux right now?, I m telling you for certain, if Linux bites a larger piece of that pie Microsoft is munching for decades, their coders will unleash an influx of any kind of viruses to show how “shitty” Linux are, I really feel safe to be on that 2%, let people find their own way.
This is awesome. I hope the students don’t start enjoying xbill :p
I looked up xbill and this looks fun, I might try it on my computer actually! thanks btw
Lol, blast from the past…
I believe soon will a kid learn to install roblox、Minecraft and teach other kids ☠️
How did you install them? One by one? Wouldn’t this be the perfect case for fedora’s atomic distros?
yes, one by one, and I choose mint because It was approachable, and thats what I showed to the principal to convince him to let me do this in the first place, and oh I didnt know there was an atomic version of fedora
If you had installed bazzite those kids would worship you
Congratulations on your win.
Although it is fun to run around updating each PC individually, as the install numbers increase, Clonezilla can be helpful to multicast one OS image to many PCs in parallel.
yeah uhhh I’m wondering if I could ask the principal to let me come around once a month to update the computers
Was recommending this to speed up your next fresh lab install. :^)
ooooooooh, right rightz my bad I’m dumb
I don’t think that at all (c:
I don’t judge you for the choice. It’s an honest question since you take care of a lot of computers and with ublue you have good control of the machines
oh no make no mistake, I was not implying that, I’m just explaining why I choose mint, I now learned that there are distros that can be deployed on multiple PCs at once thanks to you, so thanks a bunch!
This is great! The science teacher who used to also look after all the computers at my school was a big fan of the Acorn Archimedes/RISC PC (quite standard school computers in my day due to the BBC computer literacy stuff, where Acorn won the contract for the BBC Micro). We had a couple of PCs (RM Nimbus) which didn’t get as much use. I believe the plan was to switch over to PCs running Windows (95 had been out a couple of years) and because of that he left. I wonder if there was a viable alternative at that point, such as Linux, that he would have stayed.
windows 95 and RICS PCs…this makes me feel nostalgic…
I am old.
same (I might still be younger than you though…but I was definitely using 95 back when it was new, however I was very young then)
Linux was always readyfor the education sector. I think already for 10 years now.
It was ready since day one. Linus wrote Linux while a student at the University of Helsinki. It was inspired by MINIX, which was also targeted for use in schools.
When I heard about schools using Chromebooks literally the first thing I said was “Linux can do more than a Chromebook can and is free, why the hell aren’t they using that?!” Linux running on the cheapest OEM laptop (make sure you get ones without the prepaid Windows license so you don’t spend more than you need to) is a better experience than the most expensive Chromebook.
The user experience is not as important as the management tooling.
fair enough, I just hope at some point schools and organizations switches to the cool penguin.
Back in my days I was also disappointed that schools weren’t using Linux. So I totally agree with you.
My highschool used Ubuntu exclusively back in 2010
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based, also I agree decentralized media is the best
its the based form of the internet
