this post was submitted on 01 May 2025
1558 points (98.6% liked)

Linux

53785 readers
1184 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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.)

(page 2) 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] kylian0087@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (2 children)

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.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] tibi@lemmy.world 25 points 21 hours ago (5 children)

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.

[–] beastlykings@sh.itjust.works 1 points 10 hours ago

I was thinking more like using an immutable or atomic os instead, like bazzite or bluefin. At least then you get regular updates, and core functionality is safely protected.

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] Samsy@lemmy.ml 10 points 18 hours ago

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.

[–] brbposting@sh.itjust.works 31 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Roblox in the trash AHAHAHAHA

Beautiful effort!!

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] lord_ryvan@ttrpg.network 16 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Ace120C@sopuli.xyz 6 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

we dont have the K, just the regular, eitherway these were fastest computers (lenovo thinkcenter) we have, but there weren't many of em, most were with the i5 (HP Elitedesk G1)

[–] lord_ryvan@ttrpg.network 2 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (1 children)

we dont have the K, just the regular

Ah, my bad (^^;
I ran an i7-4790K in my gaming PC for a long time, as far as games go this 10-year old CPU still hold up well, never had to upgrade it surprisingly enough!

Still, a 4 GHz quad-core with hyper-threading, and about 8 GiB of RAM, is more than enough to run Windows 10.
Assuming these are for studying, the heavier workloads would consist of MS Word, Powerpoint and an instructional video in the webbrowser, no?
What required tasks were too heavy for these computers under Windows 8/10?
And do they run off SSDs, or spinning HDDs?

[–] Ace120C@sopuli.xyz 2 points 15 hours ago

VS Code.

and uhhhh Chrome (ew)

basically made those computers run like a tractor and tbf a tractor is probably fast (not an issue anymore now since I just put brave and firefox on em and convinced the principal to ditch chrome for brave)

[–] Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago)

Or they could just have been infected. Especially the ones on Windows 8, which has been EoL for over a year.

[–] The_Caretaker@lemm.ee 19 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

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.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] bonnashejve@europe.pub 9 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] Ace120C@sopuli.xyz 5 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

based, also I agree decentralized media is the best

its the based form of the internet

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] pineapple@lemmy.ml 15 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Ace120C@sopuli.xyz 6 points 21 hours ago

luckily its just VSCode, so I didnt have to install something thats too hard!

[–] Zink@programming.dev 28 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] starstriker@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] Ace120C@sopuli.xyz 9 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

yes but they will have to learn the OS, thats also a good thing

[–] TerHu@lemm.ee 6 points 21 hours ago

yeah i also think that if people get their things to run, they probably learned something in the process

[–] SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.ml 26 points 1 day ago (4 children)

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

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] ColdWater@lemmy.ca 4 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (1 children)

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

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] harcesz@szmer.info 4 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

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

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] bpev@lemmy.world 14 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Focus on lessons instead of slacking, eh?

workstation013 is not in the sudoers file. 
This incident will be reported.
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] blayd@lemmy.ml 5 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

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!

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] neon_nova@lemmy.dbzer0.com 27 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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?"

[–] turtlesareneat@discuss.online 17 points 1 day ago (1 children)

You know it's bad when Shadow IT starts migrating your inventories.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 187 points 1 day ago (6 children)

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.

[–] xor@lemmy.dbzer0.com 126 points 1 day ago (14 children)

another example of: one of the best ways to teach children is to trick them.
try to force them to use linux and the terminal? booooring, hell no….
give them linux computers without games?
they’re 1337 haxors in two weeks… with skills that will help them for life….
especially if they ever get locked in a building with velociraptors….

load more comments (14 replies)
load more comments (5 replies)
[–] termaxima@programming.dev 4 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

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.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] merde@sh.itjust.works 118 points 1 day ago (5 children)

you're lucky to have an open-minded principle

load more comments (5 replies)
[–] PumpkinSkink@lemmy.world 61 points 1 day ago (9 children)

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.

load more comments (9 replies)
[–] markstos@lemmy.world 81 points 1 day ago (6 children)

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/

load more comments (6 replies)
load more comments
view more: ‹ prev next ›