I hear you and a big part of it IS the learning process for me but also I would like something ready-to-go for education so that nothing post-install would be needed at all except logging in to one’s accounts (google, M$, etc.). the reason I am looking at it that way is in case we have high school IT teams who aren’t super familiar with setting up even Ubuntu who can run the installer and be going in no time. I realize that sounds kind of dumb because, well why WOULDN’T they have experience with Linux (and Ubuntu being one of the easier ones), but of the three high schools that I have worked at as a teacher the one that I am at now has no one with Linux experience, the one before this I am not sure, and my first HS had the gym teacher as the IT admin so i don’t think it’s necessarily as far-fetched as it may seem at first glance. Does that make sense? My other thought is that making it super easy like this may open the door for some people who would otherwise not even think of trying a new OS.
I get the arguments against Ubuntu and its derivatives but ease of use is a strength in my opinion. I have run Arch on my Dell laptop before and yea, it worked, but I ended up going back to what I was familiar with. The way I look at it though is that if I can give a school a turn-key solution for basically any set of computers that they have (chromebooks included) with basically no setup required then its more likely to be picked up by someone.
With that said though, I’m definitely interested if anyone here has worked IT at a high school and what their thoughts are as what I know I have leraned from talking with those groups but i have never actually spent a day in their shoes before as I just teach English.
thanks a ton for the feedback and I have thought about going Debian - or even another route - and might still in the future.
I’m speaking from experience; I’ve been some form of IT for two different school districts. One where we pulled a Linux install in the computer lab for several reasons. From an administrators perspective, Chromebooks are the way to go. I’m guessing your IT is small, and unwilling to change and try new approaches. This is very common in schools, and there aren’t many good approaches. You don’t want to make an enemy of the team by going over their head too forcefully, especially if it’s not your responsibility, but sometimes you can’t convince them. This is in the US, where there are vendor solutions and resources for admins to administer whatever environment they choose. If the option isn’t there, then Linux does look like a good alternative. There are a few spins already out that I haven’t followed recently, focused on education, such as edubuntu. Really, you should be working with the admin to address the issues that they have, not trying to use Linux because Linux. Those initiatives don’t work. You want the best tool for IT AND for students, and that takes a lot of work. If you’re just trying to get people into Linux, then showing them a clean install may be better, as they then see how the process differs from what they are used to.
Im not totally sure making a distro to “install software students would need” is a good idea. Why not create a installer script instead? Much smaller. You can shove it in git (much easier). You can install software that you aren’t allowed to package into a distro with it.
The idea is to have it be similar to what edubuntu was but to my understanding edubuntu was killed off in 2015…a script would work but my thought is that having an out-of-the-box solution is less scary for the uninitiated…but also my thought was that in the future i could customize it for my school/other schools as well so that if they were to install it on many computers that, again they could install it and have everything there and ready right from the first boot apart from updates, customized for them…in short my thought is to have an OS for education where the user and even for that matter the IT department wouldn’t need to touch Terminal at all and would have it the way that they want it
I believe that edubuntu was killed off around 5 years ago…there is elementary but i dont like how locked down that one is…i agree with you about going over the IT group which i don’t intend to do but the team at my particular school knows very little about linux from my understanding and yea, it is small so an out-of-the-box solution might be less scary for them in some ways and would be usable without them requiring a bunch of additional training…as for chromebooks, they basically dont exist in this country…as chromebooks were taking off the coup d’etat happened and my guess is that caused google to pull any/all marketing resources that were going to put here (since then the lira has tanked as well keeping them away)…thats my GUESS though, its of course possible that this was never even a target for google/partners…with that said though, one of my thoughts was that for underfunded school districts with x86 chromebooks in other countries this could be an option to get some more life out of CB’s that have gone past google’s support which was the case with the older chromebook that i personally own…there IS nextcloud of course but the thought was that this could get those places another few years of updates with the only costs being the switch to this OS and testing (though ones with only 16GB SSD’s may want to switch to a 32GB SSD)…as for using linux itself, i have several reasons why i personally like it for education - i mean the whole idea of community itself for one but apart from that admins could use cockpit to administrate the devices once they are on campus for security etc, the cost of course is one driver (though M$ does have good education discounts), great hardware support for a variety of different devices, and a damn good set of apps available (though as a teacher i can tell you a LOT of what we do is just on Chrome anyway)…and of course my hope too is that this becomes less messy over time as linux typically does compared with windows with a lower risk of malware, easy updates, etc. (students aren’t the most security-minded when it comes to the internet and like to break things), …anyways i get you, and if MY school in particular doesn’t want to use it then so be it, i still personally see enough benefit to work on it with the nice bonus of me learning some stuff along the way too…as for running a standard version, yes, they could certainly do that, but im trying to make adoption as easy as possible for anyone who isn’t too comfortable with this type of stuff which is also why i went with an ubuntu base
that makes me a bit nervous because theres nothing in the HP ProBook 5330m that is NOT supported natively by ubuntu out of the box and im using just regular budgie as the base and going from there - but NOT removing any hardware support (that i know of)…at any rate thanks again for testing and for the feedback - i will be testing this on more devices as I am able to as well so while i don’t have a similar machine at the moment i will be looking for one to try to duplicate the issue…thanks again man and sorry for the trouble