this post was submitted on 01 May 2025
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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.

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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.)

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 weeks ago (2 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

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Roblox in the trash AHAHAHAHA

Beautiful effort!!

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Focus on lessons instead of slacking, eh?

workstation013 is not in the sudoers file. 
This incident will be reported.
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[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 weeks ago (5 children)

Lol a kid can google how to install games on linux, just need one to do it and teach the others, I used to bring games on a usb to play on macs through wine through the school lan, eventually I put them in some random folder on the school network, it didnt delete it til like the last day of school my senior year, wed copy the games to our computers and delete them at the end of class.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 3 weeks 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.

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[–] [email protected] -2 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

1: You sure you had the right permission to do so?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 weeks ago

??? He said he talked to the principal multiple times

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

They will just wipe these computers

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

This post reminded me of year 7, and spending like 3 or more hours with the school tech getting their shitty Education Queensland spyware to function on Linux Mint. Next thing was circumnavigating the web filter, and getting Wine to run 😂

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 weeks ago

Btw I would recommend leaving a note on the desktop saying something like COMPUTER_SPECS.TXT. I had Linux on my computers in school, and I was thinking "holy crap Linux is slow and old", but it turned out to be cheap hardware (and I didn't know better, back then)

[–] [email protected] 28 points 3 weeks 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?"

[–] [email protected] 18 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 weeks ago

It’s like the elf that helps the shoemaker at night.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

The pictures OP posted suggest the distro is Mint. At the last time I installed it, I remember double clicking a exe file brings up a dialogue which asks if I want to run it through WINE.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 weeks ago

I'll let them figure that out themselves xddd

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

thank you for your very well thought out comment, and I do know about the GPL, I use it myself in my projects (AGPL for my neocities website and GPL3.0 for some of my other projects), the GPL is a very good license to your most important projects and I never skip it, I only use like BSD/MIT/CC0 for stuff that I dont really care that much about, also I love Britain its a wonderful country, cheers! also good luck!

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