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Comment by marc3842h | Hacker News Reader

My primary and secondary school used Free Software extensively. They ran Ubuntu on all school laptops and everyone used LibreOffice. The web browser of choice was Firefox. The teachers recommended us to use LibreOffice at home too in order to have full compatibility for our assignments.

I spoke with the IT manager of the school and he's a real fan of open-source. He gave a talk at a open-source convention about it (in german)[0]. In this video he talks about how he convinced the local government to budget this, how it saved cost and much more.

I think this is a great example that this can work and more schools should try this out. From what I heard, the teachers didn't have too many problems and my classmats were quick to adopt without many problems. If I'm honest, I experience more problems with the Microsoft stack in my current school.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fY47YY5BIGc

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My secondary school used Free Software exclusively.

In 1996.

That meant Debian on desktops (in classrooms, 486s with boot floppies and 10MB LAN mounting root over NFS and then XDMCP'ing over to a bigger X server; in the offices and computer labs, Pentiums with local installations, still sharing /home over NFS).

StarOffice was used for everything. We learned Perl in Grade 9 and had our own ~username websites. I ran a LambdaMOO.

I didn't realize how extraordinary this was until I visited a school with locked-down Windows NT 4.0 workstations and began to understand how amazing of a perk I had by having a computer teacher who pushed for this, against the wishes of more conventional teachers who wanted the safe option.

FVWM95 was a godsend in this regard - we could fool some people into thinking they were just on a weird variety of Windows.

I credit my career to this choice and wish I could find the teacher to thank him, but he has a John Smith tier name making him impossible to track down.

Out of curiosity: How did the pupils react to this environment? Where they annoyed or did they like it?

I think most didn't notice. Basically everyone in our class used their smartphone as primary computing device, only a few even have used laptops or computers at home. Those that did were quickly able to adapt and I only rarely heard complaints.

I've been in similar environments. Kids are flexible, resilient, and don't really notice things like this after a very short time. I was in a summer program in high school where we used Unix, and I think there was a one or two week curve before it was just in the background. In schools, kids put up with much more bizarre things. At the end of the day, they just come to understand that's what the world is.

in France most (if not every) public school uses OO/LO - and not since a couple years ago, it's been almost 15 years. Never heard of anyone having an issue with it.

This school district in the USA almost exclusively uses Free Software:

TED Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8Co37GO2Fc&app=desktop

RedHat Video: https://youtu.be/Nj3dGK3c4nY

The IT Director there has also written a book: https://www.amazon.com/Open-Schoolhouse-Building-Technology-...

[Full Disclosure: He and I are good friends.]

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