Linux

Figure out your mass deployment strategy and the tooling that you'll need to support it. The reason why Ubuntu and rhel are popular in these kinds of sectors is because of this tooling

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.

you're lucky to have an open-minded principle

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/

this is actually so insanely epic, good job!

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

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

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

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!)

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.

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

Linux over here being all environmental and shit.

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.

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

I've actually been using linux with older customers for years. It solves several problems. First, it lets them get more life out of their older machines. Second, its free. Third, the kind of malware that targets linux systems isnt really a factor for little old man on facebook. Finally, when scammers call, they cant establish credibility with my customers. They get in, remote access barely works thanks to wayland not liking their tools yet. The entire system looks different and the commands are different so they dont understand how it works but the customer does. So the scam falls apart where they try to prove they know what they are talking about because they cant use the terminal properly. It always ends the same way. My customers get suspicious and say "I'm going to call my computer guy" and the hang up.

This trick has been successful for years and my users are very happy not to have to deal with microsoft's bullshit. The fact that it confuses the hell out of scammers is just a nice bonus.

Roblox in the trash AHAHAHAHA

Beautiful effort!!

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.)

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

Cool story bro.

Except the story is actually cool, and you're a real bro!

I love Linux. I'm running Linux and love the experience.

But...

~~i7-4970~~ i7-4790 so running windows 10 with all its bloat was not going to be an easy task for em

What in the world are you talking about, man??

Even ignoring the silliness of the "bloat" - i7-4790 eats Win10 alive and asks for seconds.

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

So... No, you didn't stop them from doing that. All it takes for them to get back to playing games is to google "linux roblox how to" and 20 minutes later they're good to go. Windows has AppLocker, and GPO to prevent running unwanted software - have you researched alternatives for Linux?

does this mean linux now is ready for the education sector?

Well, depends on scale. The setup you did is fine for, what, a single classroom? Two classrooms? It's completely unusable for a larger school - for that you need an MDM solution, ideally with some form of IAM. In the Windows world that's SCCM/Intune with AD/EID (local/cloud). Correct me if I'm wrong, but there's only bare-bones equivalents in the Linux world for that, which would be the bigger a problem the larger a school you'd be dealing with.

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.

I love it. Way to go!

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

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.

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?"

Holy shit if there’s that much dust on the front grille of the computer I can’t even imagine how much is caked on the internal heat sinks. I bet you could literally double the speed of these computers with a vacuum or air blower.

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

.. And this is how you land in IT work

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.

And IMO if one of those students can get Roblox working on Linux, they have solved a harder problem than any homework they would be given 😆.

I'm curious how ootb mint works out for this usecase. Any chance we could get a 6mo update later? I'm particularly curious how well it holds up against non-admin users who may constantly be trying to get root-level access. There's almost certainly going to be one student who figures out a local privilege escalation.

Sweet.

I would have gone with Fedora in order to deploy FreeIPA for an Active Directory equivalent, but this is a good start.

Does your school have an it department? If not maybe that can be a job for you. Someone will need to maintain that fleet.