Hacker News Reader

Comment by huertanix | Hacker News Reader

I can see those being setbacks, but on each point:

1. I'm not sure on the situation in Russia, but in the US, a lot of teachers don't know much about Windows or OS X either, but unless something breaks they wouldn't have to.

2. Gnome's memory footprint is rather large, sadly. Depending on whether the Russian authorities roll their own custom distro or image though, they could use XFCE instead.

3. As things move more towards the cloud, I think that kids would mostly just have to learn how to use a web browser. Those are mostly the same on all modern platforms.

4. Having to learn something new is not a useless skill. Being able to use more than one platform demonstrates the ability to adapt to change. That's a useful skill to have.

View on HN

I've worked in education, and if something in Windows breaks the teachers wouldn't know what to do anyway.

From Neal Stephenson:

Prospective station wagon buyer: "I know what you say is true...but...er...I don't know how to maintain a tank!"

Bullhorn: "You don't know how to maintain a station wagon either!"

Yup, every point is solvable. Thinking of how life changed between 2007 and now, I can imagine how in 2013 we'd have linux in bigger cities, but not earlier.

1. I believe you still need someone to maintain the system and someone to teach how to use it. This makes a requirement of at least one unix specialist (informatics teacher) per school. Takes a lot of time to train them but not impossible.

2. Probably faster hardware and unix specialists could make a distro fast enough for education (is edubuntu such a distro?)

3. Most schools have some crappy connection, though (128 kbit/s). Some schools don't have internet at all; however, those aren't very well equipped with computers anyway.

4. You're right. However, some people expect a person out of school to have some computer literacy and experience with whatever they use at work. And most of "them" use microsoft solutions for office.

5. I added a point to the initial comment. It is probably cheaper to have microsoft products now. Especially, considering support and retraining costs for open-sourced software.

1. we had a Linux specialist in a small town high-school in Eastern Europe in 1998, a time when we barely had Internet access

5. I never saw a comprehensive costs analysis of Windows versus Linux that wasn't sponsored by Microsoft, which makes me believe this is a myth perpetuated by people too conservative to change even small habits (if it wasn't for the social factor, I would home-school my child)

    2. Gnome's memory footprint is rather large, 
    sadly.

It is?

I do quite a bit of work inside an ubuntu installation on VirtualBox that is setup for a maximum of 1gb ram and it seems to work fine (I haven't seen a computer with less than 1gb of RAM installed in years, but I've also never been to a Russian school, so who knows).

A default ubuntu installation with the gnome desktop loaded up shows about 800mb free out of that 1gb, and I am sure a nice chunk of those 200mb include stuff other than gnome.

Pretty sure it would be a bit sluggish at times, but it would probably still be very usable even if you only had 512mb of RAM.

Yeah I keep hearing this too, but it's not accurate now and probably hasn't for some time. I run Gnome/Debian on a Toshiba Laptop Satellite 1600 with 384 Mb of SDRam with Gnome running and Chromium WebBrowser v10, HTop shows 267/384 Mb being used. This is with Gnome/Metacity. With Gnome/Openbox it's even less.

On my 256 MB notebook I wasn't able to install Ubuntu with Gnome. I could be that 384 MB is enough, as I had better luck with 512 MB computer. As far as I know Windows XP can install on 64 MB, that's six times less than 384 MB.

Yes, but practically how many of us use a computer with 64mb of ram (or even 256mb)?

Also, if you're ok with installing an older version of windows there is nothing stopping you from installing an older distribution of linux (I used linux on a 100Mhz Pentium with 16mb ram just fine back in the day).

> there is nothing stopping you from installing an older distribution of linux

We argument here if Gnome needs "too much" memory so that you need a relatively new computer to use it, and I gave the arguments for that, narrowing down the amount of memory needed and comparing it with still very useful and widely used XP.

Yes, but a debian version from several years ago (with gnome!) is also still very useful and would probably not demand more resources than xp.

The question was - why is it legitimate in this argument to use an old version of windows but nut an old version of linux?

> why is it legitimate in this argument to use an old version of windows but nut an old version of linux

Again, please don't change the topic, we are talking about Gnome, not about Linux in general. Linux kernel runs on my router with 16 MB RAM without any problems. Gnome is simply made without enough attention for configurations with limited resources, it's just so. There are other managers, of course. That's why huertanix mentioned XFCE.