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.)
I love Linux. I’m running Linux and love the experience.
But…
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.
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?
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.
Wow you really went out of your way to yuck OPs yum.
Yeah, I guess I sound a bit aggressive. That wasn’t the intention. I just get an allergic reaction when I see the “Linux is just better than Windows now!” stuff. It is - in some scenarios. In others it’s worse. Someone who wants to do IT (and it kinda’ sounds like OP’s heading there) needs to understand that.
SCCM is on life support. Microsoft wants everyone to use autopilot now and many places cant or wont use cloud shit. I actually worked for a place that couldn’t use it for legal reasons.
We set up a FOG server and that was that. Fuck the cloud.
Just FYI - SCCM is not the Autopilot equivalent, it’s the Intune equivalent. Intune’s Autopilot is, kind of, what Task Sequence is in SCCM.
As far as “life support” goes - it’s full featured. Security updates are still coming in, not much else they can add feature-wise in there.
As for the cloud - everything has its uses. Cloud is great if you don’t want to deal with all the bare-metal stuff. It allows one person to do the work of four, with the trade-off being that you lose some of the fine-tuning, control, or optimisation. As the saying goes: “the ‘s’ in 'Intune” stands for ‘speed’".
Don’t fuck the cloud. Just use it when it’s better than on-prem.
The cloud has one plus in modern infrastructure. It gives you someone else to blame for shit breaking. My old boss told worded it best. “I want just one throat to choke”
There are many ways to skin the cat for centralized login in Linux, including using Samba-AD or just LDAP.
Patching is IMO less fun. Landscape can work for Ubuntu but it’s finicky, and I haven’t really found anything satisfactory (FOSS) for patch management if multiple Debian systems. Setting up “unattended-upgrades” does tend to handle most of it but that doesn’t give centralized control or visibility.
It’s honestly extremely surprising to me that there aren’t still any proper FOSS solutions that handle this. Is it because it’s super difficult to do? I’ve no idea, but it’s definitely something that’s preventing a lot of businesses to switch over.
A lot of people use automation systems etc. They work, but don’t provide the same GUI/reports you might see from RHS or Windows patching systems.
I too was surprised at how sparse or apparently kludged-together the pickings were.