Linux

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.

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

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

Would Edubuntu be a better fit?

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

That’s pretty cool !

If I had to do this myself, I would probably choose NixOS, so that I could write up a config on one of the PCs, and the deploy the exact same thing on every single one and be certain the build is perfectly reproduced.

Though I’m sure there are similar tools for other distros, but that’s what I know.

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.

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!

Roblox in the trash AHAHAHAHA

Beautiful effort!!

Now students got addicted to linux ricing instead of games, jk good job op and the principal is nice for letting you do that

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.