Hi,
I will be writing petition to my government (Poland) to try to get them to ban Windows at schools. I believe it should be illegal to force children to use systems that are paid and use children’s data for AI and advertising.
Maybe you will do it as well? Let’s end this insane practice.
best thing to include a few screenshots of how easy linux mint is to use and navigate today.
Fuck it, rant time.
I was IT lead at an education trust (kinda like a school district but bigger) covering K-21 for a long time, managing a few thousand endpoints for a few thousand students. Laptops, desktops, tablets, smartphones, digital signage and embedded; devices belonging to schools, partner organisations, staff BYOD and student remote learning; structured IT suites in school campuses, stateless networks for anything portable, antique appliances that simply must work but also be accessible to particular people from anywhere; it goes on and it never ends.
No-one has time for that.
From a few central interfaces, I could deploy an application to every device. And, I could make sure that a particular website was accessible to every student from their fifteenth birthday, not a day before. And, I could make sure that any device a Ukrainian refugee logs into speaks Ukrainian. And, I could remove any bloatware. And, I could make sure that when a brand new laptop is drop-shipped to a teacher’s home address directly from the distributor it will automatically configure itself with everything they need the second they connect it to their home Wifi without me even having to touch it. And, I could apply a photo-of-the-month to every device, even overlaying it with the appropriate school’s logo. And I could disable (or force enable) any unwanted hardware or software features on any device. And I could make sure that every student’s web traffic was appropriately filtered and, if nessecary, scrutinised.
And I could prove that all of it was working: I could prove it to staff, to parents, to governors and, when it came to it, I could prove it to the police and to lawyers. “When”, not “if”.
Forget schools for a second, look instead at big corporations. They are ruthlessly profit focused, but they all run Windows, Office, SharePoint, 365, etc because even though it costs money, it’s cheaper overall and comes with a lot of protection, both technical and legal. Schools get that stuff basically for free, and it just works. Linux isn’t there yet, not by a long shot, and no education authority worth their salt is going to take the risk of being the first to experiment with their student’s wellbeing, let alone curriculum, for effectively - in their eyes - zero benefit.
To be blunt: when one of the children you are responsible for safeguarding is the victim of an attempted kidnapping that was only possible because of lax data security, no-one is going to have any tolerance for your personal philosophy about software licensing or your home-spun scripts. Ask me how I know.
Also, if your schools are letting advertisers/social media/whatever inspect student’s data, that’s nothing to do with the technology and everything to do with mismanagement: forcing them to manage yet another OS isn’t going to fix that.
TLDR: If you want to make Linux replace Windows in schools, you first need to figure out how to make Linux replace Windows in hospitals, call centres and Fortune 500 corporations.
FOSS geeks are incapable of grasping why industry standards are industry standards. They genuinely believe that all major orgs only use Windows because they’ve been bribed/tricked into using it.
Not letting sunlight into classrooms seems cruel to the children.
It’s necessary in the US to make it harder for the shooters
That’s funny. I laughed. Then quickly remembered my kids are entering the school system soon. Then I thought this was a pretty good idea. Now I’m sad.
My university had several lecture halls without windows, and it sucked!
Promoting open source software and funding them is better than banning proprietary software. Improving data protection laws will also be more productive as a blanket solution rather than selectively banning companies with suspicious data practices.
I agree with Stallman and others on this sort of thing, it should be illegal for any public institution to use proprietary, corporate software in any capacity.
Public institutions are supposed to serve and benefit the public good first and foremost. The idea that they can do that equally well or better by partnering with mega-corps who’s only fundamental drive is to generate as much profit as possible for their shareholders, is idiotic.
I think about this a lot. Living in probably the most digitalized western country, pretty much 100% of the software used is proprietary.
We are so deep in the pockets of Microsoft. It’s disgusting. The same goes for pretty much every medium/large company.
One big thing you need to think about is accessibility. This is something that came up in a conversation with a local representative in the UK - for children in public schools it is a requirements that any technology have good accessibility and not leave anyone behind. And accessibility tools on linux are, suffice to say, not great. Especially when compared with those on other closed systems. My local government ended up going with iPads for kids in schools, and the accessibility tooling on these was a factor in that choice.
What exactly do you think children are losing out on specifically in regards to accessibility when most apps these days are accessed through a web browser or interface? You can always have some specialty computers in certain departments for learning things like video or photo editing that may not work well on Linux but for most general purpose computing, open source more than covers those needs.
Its not about what can or cannot be done with the operating system but rather what functionality it has to support those with impairments to things like hearing or sight.
I posted a rant above, but 100% this. You can put users into a particular group in your directory and then they’ll get their required screen reader, high contrast theme, large text, visual queues, native language, etc, on every Windows, Android, MacOS, ChromeOS or iOS device they use out of the box, no further tools needed. Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora? Not so much.
I’ll add that I learned from another user on here who administers a fleet of Chromebooks and iPads for a school that those devices make management of the classroom much easier. They’re designed with it in mind. He tried exploring Linux and it just didn’t allow teachers to monitor for inappropriate activity the same way.
I’d start by banning tablets, what the fuck is the point of “learning” IT stuff on a glorified 10 inch phone? Get them fucking laptops, even better with Linux, but I feel like even going BACK to Windows PCs would be an improvement at this point, sad.
100% agree and support your determination. Unfortunately, however, it’s not gonna happen.
Currently, Microsoft (and other companies, but mainly Microsoft in Poland) offers schools and universities discounted Windows licenses, as well as very cheap or straight up free Microsoft 365 packages for all students. It comes with 24/7 technical support, which education facilities desperately need, since staff is tech illiterate and they can’t (or can, but won’t) afford IT departments.
Furthermore, Poland is an American puppet state, and won’t make any decision that substantially hampers American interests. As we’ve been shown many times over, even in just the last two years.
It’s so obvious that children and students, especially university students in tech fields, should work mostly with FOSS, unless a FOSS option is unavailable (very rare cases). Not only would they get more meaningful knowledge and skills, but the country would reduce its dependence on the US Empire as well. If only governments ever did the obvious good thing.
Even if this won’t push it throughout it stars people talking about it which is already good.
Also; used to work in a small polish school that run everything on Linux, only windows was a VM for some state software for documents.
I agree all public institutions should use foss. But what makes you think Poland is an american puppet state?
It’s not just Poland, but like half of the EU. Not due to faults of their own, for the most part, but as usual due to the US Empire forcing weaker countries to do its bidding, and meddling in their elections.
Poland’s current president is an obvious American asset. Whether he works or worked directly with the US or not - he has clearly demonstrated that his loyalties lie with Washington. Just like the previous president, and the one before him, and so on.
Most of the government remains very much pro-US, and pro-Israel as well, both of which are closely tied. Government officials, like the current prime minister, may publicly criticize the US, but then go back to discussing terms favourable for the US or sanctioning Chinese companies at Washington’s request behind closed doors.
The Polish government still continues to buy American-made military equipment.
Just last week prime minister Tusk publicly defended the terrorists who bombed the Nordstream pipeline, echoing both Trump’s and Biden’s rhetoric.
Last year he invited Netanyahu to Poland, completely disregarding the ICC warrant for his arrest. Just as the US was putting sanctions on the ICC for said warrant.
All major Polish companies are being purchased by American corporations, putting the entire Polish economy at serious risk in an event of a conflict between the EU and the US. The government introduced legislation to protect Polish companies from being acquired by foreign ones, but it conveniently ignores any transactions with American companies. In addition to all EU countries, which makes sense, and some more questionable ones such as Israel, Australia, or the UK.
The list goes on and on. A lot of what the current one, as well as previous governments do tends to benefit Washington disproportionately more than it does the EU or even Poland itself.
Not to mention it still appears so lost in its American delusions that it seriously thinks the US will do anything to aid Poland in case of a Russian attack.
The monkey’s paw curls. All windows have been removed from every school building. Solid walls in every classroom.
Go for it, but please consider the platform you use for that carefully and get as many partners as possible beforehand - gives much bigger chances it reaches more people.
Pracowałem przy kampaniach społecznych, w razie czego służę doświadczeniem.
Also ban Google. I think we should ban any schoolwork in required courses that requires students to agree to any third-party EULAs, such as Google account and Windows OS. For selective courses, considering the de facto status that many fields don’t have a mature enough open source software, banning is a bit exceeding proportionality IMHO. And offering Windows computer is probably ok as long as it’s not the default choice IMHO.
In my freshman year in the Electrical Engineering department, I took a required computer programming course, the course that I supposed it to be most aware of the existence of GNU/Linux, free format, and so on. However, it uses Google Sheets for homeworks and demands a Google Drive link of an exe for final team project and YouTube link for presentation. When they let students evaluate each other, I just got a bunch of exe, half of which doesn’t even open in Wine.
I also think they every school should offer NextCloud. Otherwise when team work occurs, Google Drive/Docs/Slides/Sheets is the de facto only choice.
BTW, I think LaTeX with git is more customizable and extensible and should be taught instead of teaching MS Office stuff. I actually take all my notes in LaTeX in a GitHub repo and do reproducible compilations.
Yeah Nextcloud for all learning entities would be huge. We actually have that in Germany for all universities, issue is the vast majority of people don’t even know it exists. And honestly I doubt any of them would even care to use it if they did.
BTW, I think LaTeX with git is more customizable and extensible and should be taught instead of teaching MS Office stuff.
Right. I am using it over 30 years now, for uni reports, phd rhesis, talks, letters, CVs, and never had any regret.
Keep in mind this is a very techy place. I doubt the LaTeX learning curve is worth it for the average Joe. It certainly shouldn’t be the only option for all document writing in school.
I don’t know how much IT experience you have, but at the end of the day when an organization pays for license, they’re paying for a fall-guy. They want to have someone to go to when there’s a problem with the software, because that’s cheaper than everyone needing to hire an expert at whatever issues pop up to be certain it’s solved.
They don’t want to have a bunch of PCs running whatever distro and domain software the last IT guy felt like going with. And when the next heartbleed/shell shock/spectre happens, they don’t want to have to figure out how to get the fix for the flavors of software they went with. They want to be able to say “hey company, this is what we pay you for” and the company to say “all good, we got you”.
Of course, it is possible to have both open software, and corporate support. This is why redhat exists. Just understand that your IT dept may have a preference based purely on how easy/hard it makes their job. When my PC has some bug or hw incompatibility, I’m willing to take the time to solve it. But someone who doesn’t have that time is going to prefer to just tell the company that made it to solve it.
I’m also on-board with no computers in schools, as someone else brought up. Phones should not be allowed in classrooms. Before we had LLMs running on calculators, my idea was to have a series of optional classes where you build your own calculator starting from logic gates, and that’s the only computer you’re allowed to use.
Which given the budgets that most schools have for equipment, software and staff is currently entirely reasonable.
It’s probably doable if a country pushed to create a defacto well documented distribution that’s paired with a MDM and online office suite. Basically replicate a locked down Chromebook environment, a lot of edu resources are online these days so most activity is through the browser.
EU Office appears to be the start down that road.
I mean, hell, Fedora SOAS is a thing.
and Google (classroom, chromebooks etc). Treating children as products is abuse.
I wouldn’t “ban Windows at school” as a whole but I would:
- ban schools from installing windows in school computers
- teachers and students can still use it on their own computers, if they want
- ban teachers from requiring windows-only software
- regardless of what you use at school, teachers would often require MS office or Adobe for homework, which would force students to use windows at home
Fully agree.
- ban schools from installing windows in school computers
