Linux

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.

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.

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.

Would Edubuntu be a better fit?

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.

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

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

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.

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?"

this is actually so insanely epic, good job!

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

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.

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.

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.

Linux over here being all environmental and shit.

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

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!)

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

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

I love it. Way to go!

Focus on lessons instead of slacking, eh?

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

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

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.

.. And this is how you land in IT work