Schools should be using open source software
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Our Microsoft licensing cost £1000 per year, and our MSP cost about £10,000 for remote support and a weekly onsite.
Using Linux, our licensing cost would have gone, and maybe we’d have gotten another year or two from desktop hardware, but our support costs would have increased massively - I couldn’t find a local msp who’d do desktop Linux support the same way we were getting. not to mention all the training for teachers, and the nightmare of finding replacements for things like smart notebook, custom assessment software, and windows only curriculum software.
Biggest headache would have been the teachers. Some of them found windows 10 too difficult to use, and pushing them onto Linux would have needed a full time techie on hand.
linux is better is not always the case.
- Device drivers and configuration of things like the X Server. From what I've heard this can be mitigated by buying well-supported hardware.
- Software that wasn't included in the distro's package repositories. This is where linux can really fall down in my experience, along with the fact software like MS Office isn't supported at all. But if you don't need anything beyond standard software then it can often "just work" more smoothly than something like Windows.
Anything reaching a high level of complexity basically falls apart on Windows. I can tell someone on Unix: "Type exactly X" into the command prompt.
If I want someone to get there editing the registry, using the Window terminal and/or modifying complex system settings through a GUI which changes seemingly every week, it's basically a dead-end.
Kids learn terminals fine too.
You can take away their root access, and if needed, ssh in and do remote support if needed.
Obviously, linux also work excellently for advanced users, those who can just fire up a windows VM and pass through a GPU if they want some windows functionality. (Exactly what I'm doing now. I like to run Windows on top of zfs, as since snapshots make backups/clones, etc so easy.).
For those inbetween, that do intermediate complexity tasks and don't want to struggle with the OS to do them, Windows/Mac is easier.
You can get absolutely insane educational discounts.
Beside that: Microsoft have invested big money on desktops, their own way, it's normal you find better support around, and that's because schools do not teach anything IT related as they MUST, witch means for users, not against them...
Linux still doesn't have anything remotely as capable as Active Directory.
Chrome is outright terrifying to have on a computer if you don't push down about four pages of enterprise policies to lock it down.
The idea of letting employees have administrative access to PCs that sensitive corporate data or childrens' personal info is on is downright terrifying.
If banks can let you access your account information on non-bank owned machines and parents can access their kids personal info from their phones I think we can manage a fleet of untrusted endpoints.
The number of times I have seen people being okay with computer slowdown due to adware or viruses is insane. Some folks I know go with policy of computer format over every year because it is "natural" for computer to get slow over time according to them. Really most people are fine with downloading any software they see from web. There is a reason that fake software are highest paid ad category and only porn sites shows it.
Group policy is such an insanely convenient configure-once-apply-everywhere system, I'm still not sure why anyone would run a corporate network without it. Modern MDM solutions don't even come close to the extensive level of customization you can do with a GPO.
What about signing in with your firstname.lastname account, with the particular web app talking with the AD server through something like LDAP?
Thus, your credentials for all of the integrated software should be managed centrally, in the particular AD server or a similar solution.
Or maybe even SSO with something like Kerberos or an alternative?
And why do you need to control people’s laptop login? That can be local.
Some organizations might want to ensure that your account follows certain policies in regards to the password expiry dates or how "secure" they are.
Furthermore, if you leave an organization, they might want to remove all of your access credentials to all of the linked platforms/devices in one fell swoop.
While you are in the organization, they might want to allow you to use certain pieces of software (say, GitLab, Nextcloud, Mattermost, anything that talks LDAP) by giving you a particular group membership, such as everything for PROJECT_X/CLASS_X and so on.
Similarly, when a certain platform requires user credentials, they might also want to explicitly allow this platform to integrate with their account management software, by giving it certain credentials to talk to the AD server, which can later be revoked.
Oh, and password resets are also nice to centralize, in case you ever screw up.
Sometimes their hand might also be forced due to compliance reasons: imagine Google basically owning your company and information about all of the accounts/devices due to them having the actual data.
Microsoft is losing money to have schools run this software.
I legitimately want more people to talk about this and to share their experiences. Do people run OpenLDAP? Something like FreeIPA? Maybe 389 Server?
What's the most popular or maybe easiest to use *nix solution for managing lots of accounts and devices, policy etc.? What about solutions for just managing accounts/login information or integrating with self-hosted software of all sorts?
Spoken like someone with identifiable personality disorder. Get evaluated and stop pathetically trying to hurt others when it is clear the deep anxieties are yours.
AD is only miraculous in that it is the one thing, the one and only thing among a vast many, that Microsoft got right. And the reason they got it right is that AD is LDAP and Kerberos. IOW, AD is a Microsoft-esque gui for LDAP and Kerberos. Really. It does not slice and dice, it does not blend; it is merely authentication and authorization. If you'd like, AD will auth Linux boxen users all day long. Anything else AD does is only germane to Windows.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/214641/household-adoptio...
Most of those were Windows PCs. OS/2 never took off for home users.
Schools were using either Windows or a few were using Macs - both running MS Office.
Think you might be shocked just how few people have a “personal computer” anymore. Most children and even most adults these days experience computing though tablets and phones.
That said, what schools teach is just some legislation away. I believe regulation could make it happen even now, if the regulators wanted so. But, of course, regulators are people too and therefore, yet again, it's not up to the technology itself to be better.
Can you get unlimited remote support and a weekly on-site tech for $10k a year? No way.
South Korea mandated usage of ActiveX in the 1990s as one of the first countries to push into online shopping, and it took until 2020 to get rid of it (and Internet Explorer) altogether.
Considering the difficulty of switching from IPv4 to IPv6 and extremely creative ways to update TCP (before everyone gave up), I'm not sure of that.
Are most schools and offices not running Google Docs these days for the word processing/presentation side of things?
Companies and institutions could build on that foundation to provide support and integration. It could enable a kind of specialized market for IT in education that can be relied on.
Sounds like a monumental effort. But doable. Are there any attempts at this?
This was the traditional argument against moving away from MS products.
Suddenly, most of these folks moved to Google products a few years back. Somehow these points didn't factor in. Why do you think that is?
It's a job you can get. Sometimes it's called Relationship Manager.
I’ve been a dev manager working with contracting companies in the private sector, I know how they work. I got free box seats to go to pro baseball and basketball games, got invited to lunch by the attractive sales person , etc. Could we get away with that in the public sector without a lot of red tape, lawyers, and public disclosures? Heck no.
> I couldn’t find a local msp who’d do desktop Linux support the same way we were getting.
You could find competent third-party GWorkspace support, plus unless you fully moved to ChromeOS, you will still support Windows in one way or another (although students usually gets Chromebooks, try moving a teacher using a 15-year old application that still works on latest versions of Windows). RHEL is geared towards enterprise but not education sectors, and I'm not aware of a commercial support which specialty is in the education sector.
Google is Google. They’ve been using it for years. They’re ok with the browser. Less emotional load.
We need to shed the consumer mentality when it comes to FOSS. It gives us bizarre expectations of it, and we impose unnecessary limitations on ourselves without thinking. It's ours, and we can do what we want with it.
https://explodingtopics.com/blog/saas-statistics
Should they also brings those in house?
A business can get that at retail for $160/year. A student can buy that for $79.00/4 years.
Those are retail prices. I can guarantee you that large organizations aren’t paying retail.
And don’t overlook the online component and the governance and the SSO. I know plenty of MS shops that use MS’s hosted SSO solution to log in to AWS.
It amazes me how little HN understands about the needs of large enterprises.
Heck I work for one of the Big 5 tech companies (FAANG - Netflix + Microsoft) and it isn’t MS and we all have Microsoft licenses.
Schools have no such pressures and in fact are better served by being conservative in how quickly they change what they do.
The people that love private enterprise are the often same people that think small engine repair is an essential life skill, and don't want big tech watching them.
It's not greasy and rumbly and subjectively "real" like the easy-to-market stuff, but it's still a form of self reliance to remove your dependence on a company known for randomly changing stuff whenever they want.
Same with electric cars really. Research into sustainable nonlithium batteries and cheap PV means a possibility for you to never need to buy gas again for the 30 year life of your solar panels if they pull it off.
Then again, some people don't like anything that doesn't feel solid and substantial, and the people most interested in independence might want completely tech free schools. Seems like a lot of people want to go back to paper.
Do you think that maybe the FOSS community isn’t offering consumers what they need?
They survived.
I have been doing just that for years, first at smaller companies and now working with large organizations on the other side at BigTech.
that's putting the cart before the horse.
Schools, like most non-tech enterprises, have problems to solve that are bigger than the choice of OS on their IT systems. If the end result of switching out of windows is basically the same outcome as having windows (aka, they've replaced some office programs, and other domain specific programs with a linux compatible version), then what is the value proposition _to the school_? The only value proposition of this switch is to society and free software movement in general, which the school doesn't really directly benefit from.
If the school boards change or the gov changes, so will the software makers. Support groups will be plentiful because they all just follow the money. Just like they did for chromeOS, only this time there will be less built-in spyware.
>But if they're a place for raising future generations, then as a benefit to society
Anyone who has been to a public school should be well aware they are not a place that breeds greatness. More a place that hammers it down.
How’s accessibility on Linux? I mean considering the situations with even basic things like drag and drop, copy and paste, video chat and screen sharing I don’t have high hopes that “it’s all there”
I have to use Windows at work. I choose to use Linux at home.
That’s probably because Windows 10 is more confusing to use than most general audience Linux distros.
I don't see why a similar solution couldn't exist for education, to pass the benefits of the open source ecosystem onto less technical users.
But I think using Linux would increase technical competence of pupils massively. They don't learn anything from using another iPad. They can use that better than their parents anyway because they already have phones.
Because they're bloody good (well, Photoshop is). And Gimp isn't.
> Coding IDE (optional) ===> vim
That's not out of touch, that's beyond the pale.
On adobe, I prefer using photopea than ever having to touch photoshop again, that's a tell that it isn't all that great to since a free to use replias fits all my needs.
I would concede photoshop has a better UX, on Windows and OSX that is true, but on its native linux home, it blends rather well with gtk approach to UIs and flow.
IDE wise, plenty of OSS solutions on par with commercial products now, at least for tooling education needs.
I get art from artists to integrate into apps all the time that wasn't made in photoshop. Most important is they know what they're doing, whatever they're using...
No, Gimp is quite bad when it comes to non-destructive editing. Even the FAQ mentions that [1]. As someone who works in game development, non-destructive editing, specifically layer effects are used everywhere. Especially for UI elements and stylizing text.
[1]: https://www.gimp.org/docs/userfaq.html#when-will-gimp-suppor...
Given the fact that IT teachers are scarce (at least here; teachers for programming aren't available at all below advanced educational levels), I do think that simply foregoing teaching these skills might even be better.
Why is this relevant to the use of gimp ot libreoffice? I never had to open a text editor to use gimp or libreoffice (well apart than writer itself duh).
It's not about the features. I agree there's more or less feature parity for the 90% of use cases, but gimp has bad UX.
It's just clunky and frustrating to use, and there's no sugar coating that fact.
I hate using gimp.
Having used both as well as alternatives (like paint shop pro and some others), this is mostly resistance to change. You are used to photoshop so anything with a different paradigm will feel unituitive. Same with libreoffice and office if you don't care to understand the concepts.
Resistance to change is a strong thing. Objectively, macos and windows desktop are slow and clunky interfaces compared to say, gnome3. Yet many people even among linux users hate the later because they have been used to slow and clunky and don't understand smooth.
That said, gimp is free. Adobe Creative Suite is over half a grand a year. For most people, knowing gimp is a useful life / workspace skill. Only the very elite will have access to Photoshop. Learning Adobe tools is simply not helpful for 98% of the population, as a life skill (beyond the general skills learned with any tool).
"B-b-ut Photoshop cornered the market", wrong, plenty of new apps like Procreate have found success just by being a tiny bit innovative and delivering a quality experience.
I really like OSS (and have contributed to several projects) but what matters in the end is the UX. There's a reason why Apple is a trillion dollar company.
Some projects are just mediocre and stagnant while trying to save face by saying they are OSS, at the end of the day no one cares, people just move along.
Other projects are so poisoned now that they barely resemble what they once were in their best times, i.e. Firefox and their self-imposed race to the bottom.
There is a lot to say about Mozilla management but Firefox the browser is really good.
This is just a lie. My hatred of Adobe borders on the unhinged but to compare GIMP to photoshop is a joke, it’s not even the pro features just the basic requirements that were completely expected 15+ years ago are missing and the attitude of the team to the userbase when they ask for these features is extremely poor.
Honestly it’s time to start comparing GIMP to its real competitor, MSPaint.
It’s not just UX, it’s the basic features they’d need to do a job with the tool are not there.
Or saving image where Photoshop often does not remember from where the file was opened, or that I have to manually select a file type from a drop down. In gimp, just type the extension. I also like scripting and automating using python.
On the other hand, Photoshop excels in layer effects. In gimp, these effects are applied and you cannot mutate the underlying layer (like change text with shadow and bevel).
You can do this in photoshop. It’s in the channels tab, select it and filters will work on it.
Although I do agree 2022 photoshop is a janky slow pile of trash compared to CS5 photoshop.
> Because they're bloody good (well, Photoshop is). And Gimp isn't.
Imagine you're teaching people carpentry. There is a really nice automatic screw gun that accepts a cartridge of screws all lined up automatically so each one loads in place after the last one. It is super easy to use and people can get straight to fastening beams together. But the device is very expensive, and they cannot be repaired if they break, and the screw cartridges require a monthly plan where they will send you screws even if you still have plenty from last month, with a chip to make sure the screws won't feed from last month.
Now compared to a boring battery operated drill, where the user has to gasp place each screw on the drill bit by hand, these fancy automatic screw feeding drills seem WAY BETTER! Surely the person can make better buildings with the fancy screw gun right? And we want them to make the best buildings possible right?
Well the boring drill has user serviceable parts. Everything can be removed and replaced if needed. There are no control chips to stop it working. You don't have to pay every month for anything. And placing each screw on the bit by hand is fine, it's what everyone did ten years ago and those buildings are all still standing. Heck you're standing in one of those buildings right now!
So maybe we should teach the students how to use tools that work without all this extra cost and nonsense. It's really a minor difference, since the point isn't to use the fanciest possible tool, but to teach them how to build buildings in a way that they can always take with them everywhere they go. And after they graduate school, they're not going to want to pay every month for one of those fancy drills!
This is why teachers use Word and Google Docs. They do not give a shit about the tool. The tool is a means to an end. Word and Docs are familiar. Word and Docs work.
And it’s a different skill set for sure, but highly worth it - someone who knows how do use it can hang drywall by themselves pretty easily.
If that’s your job, you should definitely know how to use it (and how to use just the gun, and the simple drill).
It's only the weaker students who are quick to "demand the latest shiny industry standard gizmos... because, like, jobs". And of course the management twonks who've been blinded by vendor lobbying and kickbacks. Truth is, modern software is so slick any fool can grab a ready-made plugin-o-matic that thinks for you and wipes your arse, but without understanding principles the moment they change the GUI you're completely lost.
For one thing Photoshop is a transferrable skill. Gimp will get you laughed out the door of most photo studios and design agencies.
For another - too many FOSS people just do not understand that tinkering with tools is not the point for most users.
If you like tinkering with tools, go tinker with tools. Most people have work to do, and tinkering with tools is not something they want to be distracted by.
Photoshop is far from being my favourite product, and Adobe are very far from being my favourite company. In fact I - and millions of other users - would be delighted if we could save $$$$ a year with a free alternative.
Which applies in the general case. If FOSS was a realistic and workable alternative, it would storm the market and most people would be using it.
But it isn't. Most FOSS applications are aimed at self-selecting technical users, and there's very limited interest in making tools for non-technical users.
In fact IMO FOSS culture lacks the mindset and skills - and very possibly the empathy - to understand what general users want from their tools.
It's been a success for developers who want to make technical tools for other developers. And also for infrastructure. Not to take anything from that, because that's both significant and true.
But for popular non-expert applications? Simply - no.
This is pretty much a self-perpetuating cycle and what happens when you have something close to a monopoly.
Everyone uses Photoshop, almost nobody uses GIMP. Everyone uses Chrome, almost nobody uses Firefox. Everyone uses Windows, almost nobody uses Linux and so on...
Thankfully, in the server space, *nix reigns supreme and FOSS has a larger foothold, though thanks to the above, the "year of the Linux desktop" may as well never come.
> Most FOSS applications are aimed at self-selecting technical users, and there's very limited interest in making tools for non-technical users. In fact IMO FOSS culture lacks the mindset and skills - and very possibly the empathy - to understand what general users want from their tools.
I'd say that it's also a matter of prioritizing what's necessary to get things done and simply not having the resources for the rest: UX, marketing, branding, integrations and so on.
That's simply not true. While having high market share does give you a short-term advantage, if a better alternative exists you'll bleed market share over time. Look at what happened to Netscape, then Internet Explorer, then Firefox. It'll happen to Chromium eventually too.
Open-source alternatives to popular desktop software packages have existed for decades, and the reason they haven't snatched market share away from the main packages is because they don't work well.
The time frames at play shouldn't be forgotten about here, nor should the magnitude of the effect.
Most developers universally hated IE from IE 6 (2001) to IE 11, which might still be supported until 2030:
> Microsoft is committed to support Internet Explorer that way to 2030 at least, with one year's notice before it is discontinued.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_11
And yet, it still had to be supported and for some systems still needs to be. For whatever stupid reason, many were locked into using it and had little choice. Sure, eventually it could be tossed aside by most sane enterprises, but if developers had been given proper reign over what to choose to use, then it would have been ditched a few years after the release of IE 6 (Firefox came out around 2002).
The average Joe/Jane doesn't really care about the browsers, though. They might not even recognize what a browser really is, merely know that they can use that one icon to access the Internet. Thus, the choice is made for them. Similarly, most laptops and desktop computers come with Windows preinstalled due to manufacturer deals, much like how most Android variations come with adware and other garbage. Nobody wants it, but nobody (at a certain price point), has any alternatives.
If you don't know that there's a choice to make, someone else will make it for you.
And i'd posit that there isn't as much of a difference between being technologically illiterate in Windows and being technologically illiterate in *nix.
> Open-source alternatives to popular desktop software packages have existed for decades, and the reason they haven't snatched market share away from the main packages is because they don't work well.
This is fair, though, especially because most FOSS software is basically developed below the poverty line: https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html
Nobody's going to have good UX or fancy onboarding if they can barely find enough resources to keep the project going and fix all of the bugs, as well as handle the technological churn of keeping dependencies up to date etc.
Outside of the ravings of FOSS enthusiasts and niche circumstances (e.g. servers), open source software will generally find it hard to compete with commercial offerings, most of the time, especially when it comes to software for the common folk.
I hear this a lot, but I don't think it's the primary reason why Desktop Linux has negligible market share (neither does Linus, FWIW). Plenty of people build their own PCs, or have a custom PC built for them by a friend/independent shop, and even amongst these enthusiasts Linux use is rare.
The main problem, at least in my experience as a user, is the fact that Desktop Linux is janky to use. Unless you have the time and patience to learn about all the subsystems and fix the issues that keep cropping up, you're going to want to just spend the money on an OS that "just works". OSX is obviously the best in this regard, but modern Windows with automatic driver installs comes pretty damn close.
(As a developer, the fact that there's no universally agreed-upon standards make it a pain in the arse to support too.)
>Nobody's going to have good UX or fancy onboarding if they can barely find enough resources to keep the project going and fix all of the bugs, as well as handle the technological churn of keeping dependencies up to date etc.
IMO, the main issue with open-source isn't actually finding developers (people love working on OSS) but doing the kind of boring, rigorous QA that you'll see in a commercial firm. Nobody's going to volunteer to reproduce specific edge cases in a printer driver, so it sits broken for decades.
When was the last time you used Linux, 2003?
The only problem with Linux is manufacturers that don't advertise support of their devices and that there are way too many distros so you can't have one ecosystem like you have a windows or macos ecosystem with certified devices.
But if you stick with Lenovo thinkpads, brother printers and bog standard everything running a Fedora linux is like running a macos with well supported devices.
We'd nerd having all kind of hardware sold whose compatibility is well tested and sold under the <insert your favorite distro> brands.
For the 95% use case it's fine but the 5% where stuff just breaks is infuriating.
Office just doesn't work right, and random things subtly break and it's hard to fix even as a technical user. I don't want to navigate between a bunch of files and waste time editing config files for hours. Give me a UI that tells me how to fix my shit.
Only place where I run linux now is on a virtualized server using Proxmox. Linux is a great server OS but it just doesn't work very well as a user distro.
This applies to all OSes.
> I don't want to navigate between a bunch of files and waste time editing config files for hours.
Not something you usually do on Linux but well.
> Give me a UI that tells me how to fix my shit.
My understanding of the UI on proprietary OSes when something needs to be fixed is they don't tell you at all how to fix their shit. You just enter an insane loop of "please wait while we fix your issues" dialog windows which almost never solve the issue.
At least in the FOSS world you can usually look at the logs and understand the error. Open the windows event viewer and you are mostly faced with codes that you have to search online for a signification.
It’s not just schools don’t want to use open source software and prefer MS Office, the second largest private employee is a huge licensee of Office. I assure you they know a little about Linux…
2019, with the LTS version of Kubuntu (18.04 at that time). Moved when Windows 7 EOL was announced.
The hardware I specifically had trouble with was a Brother MFC-9320CW, a Kingston MobileLite SD card reader and a TP-Link TL-WN722N WiFi dongle. All ostensibly supported, all janky to the point where I just gave up and installed Windows 10.
I also had some Intel Atom Laptop with Arch and i3wm. I didn't mind that so much since I only ever used it for a few specific functions and none of them were critical for my usual workflows. It also flew with i3. I do remember both the WiFi and CPU power management semi-regularly fucking up though.
You can be as smug as you want with your "2003" comments, but the reality is that it's simply not fit for purpose as a general purpose consumer OS.
Tell that to my girlfriend who swear against her windows 10 laptop that takes 30 minutes to be usable at boot and who 99% of the time end up borrowing mine to get something done.
Do you call that fit as a general purpose consumer OS?
I remember being surprised when a couple of older people I was building computers for asked me to put Office on them. There was only one guy I knew from my generation who still used it.
Yeah, exactly this. Open Source developers don’t care about how you work or what you want your tools to do. They care about what’s fun and interesting to program.
I can’t imagine forcing students to care about .rc files and whatever’s in /etc. Not to mention the differences between whatever shell is installed by default and the various other shells that are also scripting languages, etc. I’m a veteran programmer in my 50s and this shit is too much for me to care about. I have work to do. Editing text files in vim or Emacs is utterly stupid for most users. It’s not like TextEdit or Notepad don’t do most of what students need without a bunch of cryptic crap involved, or that IDEs wouldn’t allow students to delve into programming much more easily. I just don’t get the cult of Unix. Yes, it’s powerful for a large class of things that programmers like to do. But it’s a terrible OS for normal users. And that won’t change until the people making it and making tools for it grow up and think of someone other than themselves when they write programs.
> Yeah, exactly this. Open Source developers don’t care about how you work or what you want your tools to do. They care about what’s fun and interesting to program.
It's more likely that designing effective UX is just extremely difficult. I'm guessing it's so difficult that neither the user nor the FOSS developer even know how to define the problem in a lot of cases.
E.g., go back and try to find a pre-Google era user asking for streamlined search capability in some Linux application mailing list. Something like, "I just want to type in the thing I'm looking for and find the thing I wanted." IIRC most university library search tools before Google had a few dozen fields to specify the type of data you wanted to search for, and a crappy "keywords" field that often didn't return the desired record. So a student would search by first not finding what they were after, then calling over a librarian to help them choose the correct fields and input strings.
I'll rankly speculate that any such discussion on a pre-Google FOSS application user list would have consisted of a developer arguing that such an approach cannot work by providing a set of canned edge-cases with unresolvable ambiguities. And this response would have convinced the user who likely had no idea how the whole search algo works in the first place, or what the potential solutions could look like.
Then Google came along. (Well, the Google that exist before the current one which seems to be purposely inserting non-relevant results that a recommendation algo has determined still have a decent chance of engaging the user.) And the FOSS mailing list response tacitly shifted from, "That's probably not a well-formed feature," to, "Patches accepted." I'm not sure what the current response would be, but I doubt it generates a lot of enthusiasm for improving the UX.
Hell, even in the well-formed feature requests the implementation details are probably a major pain in the ass. For funsies-- go download the old Gimp that consisted entirely of toplevel windows, and try to figure out the most workable way of converting it a single-window app with subwindows. That's like some kind of demented detention punishment for FOSS devs who break the CoC. I wouldn't wish it on anybody.
While I agree with this, it's interesting how Blender basically resisted losing focus on boring-but-important things (while keeping the fun and interesting parts). Probably the fact that Blender was originally planned to be a commercial application.
If you could get krita/gimp/whatever "close enough" to market for industry to "see the potential" then maybe similar could happen.
Although, for all I know, there is a dark side to the Blender current ways of doing things. But for now it seems fantastic.
It also helped 3DCG is relatively niche, at least not the type of a tool that people would expect to be able to use it without learning it considerably. At the same time Blender did make some compromises around the 2.8 version to adopt to more of industry standard UI interactions as opposed to sticking with the their own way of doing
No, this is not the point of school.
This is the dichotomy of Open Source. The tool tinkerers can build fantastic things - but only what they want because it is their free time and effort. If it happens to align with the market, then great, if not, too bad.
My personal favourite exception is Blender. As a long running project it seemed to get more and more aligned with the market until the industry saw it was "close enough" to start supporting it.
If we could replicate this for other tools it'd be nice.
If it's an English Literature course then nobody cares about the tool used. Moleskine, Google Docs, Word, whatever, who cares. Google Docs is free. Why give yourself more hassle than that?
It's like a world where everyone uses a particular kind of tool that works well and is expensive, but also… the standard. Everyone expects you to know how to use this tool to do a particular kind of common work.
And then you come along and say, no, we should teach people how to use a _different_, cheaper tool! It doesn't work nearly as well, and isn't what people in the "real world" use, but if you spend years familiarizing yourself with a completely different field, you can service and maintain it yourself!
You might not get many takers.
Maybe we oughta collectively write better open source software if we want to opine on what schools should do? Gimp doesn’t have to suck, but it does. I say that with true love for gimp and admiration for the people who write it, and I can’t complain about it because I’m not helping write it. (But that is an option, you and I could contribute to gimp.)
Part of the problem is that neither of your analogies are relevant in practice. Gimp isn’t a cheaper less automatic Photoshop, it’s a tool that often doesn’t meet professional workflows at all, and certainly wasn’t made kid friendly. It’s not the same tool and can’t do the same things. Also my kids were taught both gimp and photoshop, and they hated gimp. (And adobe makes photoshop available to schools for relatively cheap, compared to retail.)
The analogy about the software being serviceable is not going to fly in schools. Submitting patches is not something teachers can do. Submitting bug reports isn’t either. So what good is a theoretical idea that the software is open? The only thing schools can do in practice is pay money for support. And money is the single biggest problem they have. Vague concerns about privacy and lock-in are just way down on the list of school & teacher priorities, right? I’m wildly in favor of having good open source software, of avoiding education market capture by for profit companies, and having insanely better privacy controls. Open source sounds awesome, but I think it needs to improve before we start demanding that people use it or teach to it.
If you don't understand how much more powerful Vim and Emacs are over notepad, most people who do know the difference would see the flaw in your opinion that all 3 are text editors and one is as good as another.
The same is true of Photoshop vs gIMP. Photoshop has non-destructive editing. gIMP does not. That alone is a huge force multiplier. Photoshop has non-destructive layer and group styles, gIMP does not have layer styles as all. That's just few of the 100s of features Photoshop has that gIMP doesn't. They're not just minor features, they're force multipliers and game changers. gIMP has been planning to add the major ones for 15yrs or so but for whatever reasons has not gotten there.
https://www.gimp.org/docs/userfaq.html#when-will-gimp-suppor...
Oh yes. I'm not using Photoshop, but some hidden-secret alternative developed by two brothers from Bavaria (PhotoLine), because I'm only doing some small-scale private hobbyist stuff, and an (even at the time) slightly older version of their software had been included for free in a photography-themed edition of some computer magazine.
That old version didn't have non-destructive layer effects (although even at that time it already supported non-destructive scaling/rotating/shearing of layers, which was quite nice, and which I gather GIMP doesn't support even today?). As my proficiency with it grew, I started running more and more into the limitations of that, until I eventually decided that maybe I should finally just buy a license for the current version of the software, since of the features it had gained in the intervening years was indeed non-destructive editing.
This turned out to be absolutely the right decision, because non-destructive layers are indeed a game changer. No more making lots of backup copies of layers, no more clumsily noting down somewhere in the layer names or wherever what sort of effects I had applied in case I needed to re-tweak something, non-destructive liquifying, etc. etc. Plus a few nifty other features, and still the same familiar UI despite the large version jump, so absolutely no reason to regret the upgrade.
Wait, let me stop your metaphor right there. How often do you imagine end-user software like Photoshop or MS Office actually "breaks" in a way that actually requires "repair"?
Imagine if you will, that most of the time that your magic screw gun happens to jam, that simply unplugging it and plugging it back in again magically cleared the problem up, and you could continue where you left off.
If you care about teaching students to design good buildings, why waste a ton of time showing them how to place screws.
> MS Office Suite ==> LibreOffice Suite
> Illustrator ==> Inkscape
> IE/Edge ==> Firefox
LoL. LibreOffice Suite is terrible compared to MS Office. There’s simply nothing on par with Excel, PowerPoint, or Word. Also many are forced to use Outlook because of MS exchange.
And if you’re talking about Excel… LibreOffice Calc doesn’t have tables (with nice styling, automatic formula filling, and using column names in formulas), and working with PivotTables requires a separate dialog box with no simple live preview.
Maybe in a parralel universe. The ribbon is a mess. It is trying to be a menu without logic and without text.
Could you name an issue you have with Calc that makes you feel it is inferior to Excel? (something more specific than look-and-feel, ideally, although I admit that may be a factor in reality)
You know, i'm not sure about that. For what i need it to do: text processing and the occasional bit of nicer layout/tables/images and so on, it's decent. The same goes for presentations and spreadsheets.
The problematic bit is that the rest of the world runs on MS Office file formats and you'll run into problems due to limited compatibility sooner or later. Then again, the formats themselves are Eldritch abominations, so that's to be expected, as the same happens with OpenDocument formats when opened in Microsoft software.
The most interesting set of problems i had were with Writer screwing up my bibliography, though most people prefer external software for that anyways: https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken/libreoffice...
(that said, dear god did i hate the requirements for reference formatting in university, why couldn't we just put a link/reference and leave it at that)
As for the other alternatives: in my opinion, Inkscape has the worst UX of them all, though can still work okay in a limited set of circumstances.
Firefox seems like an okay browser, despite the inept management in the recent years.
Thunderbird is a pretty cool e-mail client, by the way. It even includes a feed reader!
More or less the same how Word routinely messes up how images should be laid out in respect to the text around them. Though every office package does that to some degree. Or also how messy working with something like Apache POI is when you want to generate spreadsheets programmatically, or read them. Or how Windows keeps reverting diagnostics settings much like spyware would. Or how Linux distros have problems with sound drivers. Generally usable, good enough, but still with annoying quirks.
Then again, i'm not motivated enough to use LaTeX so aside from a bit of complaining, i guess i just have to tolerate the many packages out there and their quirks.
> You’re right about file formats - and of course it runs deeper, file formats are just a manifestation of feature sets and models. When you have a model mismatch, as LibreOffice does, then you’re sort of set up to fail, no matter how clean and open the file format is (or isn’t).
Hmm, i wouldn't do LibeOffice a dirty like that and dismiss it as some prime example of a particular bad architecture, nor would i agree that it's what my original argument was about.
I cannot comment on what would be a "good" office format example, as the internals of either look pretty bad to me, consider seeing what's inside those documents sometime. Extract the contents of a .docx and a .odt file and see the XML - Microsoft's is not quite readable, while OpenDocument's is a tad too verbose. It would probably have to be XML because of the node structure, but neither like HTML, nor what those two office packages have in store.
My original argument was closer to the following: regardless of a format being open or not, dealing with a domain such as word processing in any advanced capacity is likely to provide lots of accidental and lots of inherent complexity. Basically, any format that's more complicated than Markdown will have so many quirks and behavior that's specific to the implementation, that any other software package will be unable to reproduce it 1:1.
Just look at how many years it took for web browsers to even display CSS/HTML the same (for the most part) and they had the opportunity to work with a bunch of relatively simplistic standards, whereas office document formats feel way less developer friendly in that regard. Ergo, lacking compatibility.
There’s nothing bad about architecting software around ODF (it came first, after all) but it inevitably will lead to incompatibilities with OOXML. Likewise for the inverse. I wouldn’t call these quirks as much as an impedance mismatch.
LibreOffice works okay with OpenDocument formats.
Word works okay with Office Open XML formats.
The problems start when you have any program that tries working with a different format than the one that it was initially written for, due to all of the complexity.
Like driving lessons in a Porsche
Open source even if causing problems that dont exist with commercial solutions is worth it overall. Plus, linux support licences do exist.
I would much rather RH, SUSE, Canonical, Zorin, Elementary, or any other FL/OSS company get those contracts than Microsoft or Apple.
Business runs on Windows because schools run on Windows.
Even today, various linux UIs are somewhat behind Cinnamon ad Gnome, in fit, finish and polish. But in the 2000s it was a joke. KDE didn't appear until 1998 and it was very much a work in progress. Windows 95 had been out for three years and was leaps and bounds ahead.
Every year since then has been wildly proclaimed as the "Year of the Linux Desktop". It keeps getting closer, but still isn't really there.
I should've worded what I was trying to communicate better - the reason that businesses are stuck on Windows/MS Office is because all any "average joe" knows is Windows/MS Office.
In my opinion, if we want to be able to move ahead, we need to start by educating people on how to actually use a computer, instead of being used by it. Afaict, the only way to do that is to move away from the "You may do what Microsoft/Apple say you can do" reasoning that pervades schools.
That itself would require some amount of movement from Windows. Ideally, there would be a course where you learn how to use Windows/Linux/Mac and learn about other options, but as that'll never happen I would be very happy to at least see a shift from "Microsoft (and Apple if you're rich) is all there is".
The tooling simply is not there yet. Your only choice is to pay very expensive licenses to either Suse or Red Hat.
In fact, the tooling used to manage Windows and Mac fleets generally doesn't even exist for Linux, or is just very bad (Active Directory, Intune, etc ...)
Spoken like someone who doesn't have to deal with the day-in-day-out hassle of running it in a school environment and dealing with the lack of knowledge and support from your superiors and users.
We are bringing lack of knowledge and training to explain the current trend, what an irony given we are talking about sanctuaries of knowledge and education.
I tried to switch to Linux a couple of years back. The GUIs were fucked, and varied so much between distributions that everybody just defaulted to the terminal anyway.
Hardware support was a major PITA. Everything would "work", but there'd be random issues, like my printer (Brother colour laser) refusing to go above about 50dpi regardless of what setting I put, and some disk mounting service crashing internally if I inserted and removed my SD card reader too many times (nothing crazy, like 2-3 times over an 8 hour session).
These pains were on Kubuntu. A more niche (yet still for some reason recommended) distribution that I installed broke the entire desktop environment when I tried to switch from the broken, buggy mess that was Noveau to the properly QA'd Nvidia stuff.
Similar experience with my Grandpa, for what it's worth. He hated Windows 10's ads and tracking with a passion, and asked me to install Linux on his machine when Windows 7 became EOL. But nope, everything was broken.
Hard to read when convulsing in the fetal position.
No they don't. Schools need affordable and generally available software that kids can freely download, and which are flexible and open enough to be tailored. It is ironic to label solutions that basically lock-down and lock-in student's options as "turnkey". More like "throw away the key"!
> someone who will pick up the phone when they call.
But no-one ever does. This harks back to the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) FUD Microsoft were spewing in the early 00's. In 2022 we all know exactly what big-tech customer support looks like even if you pay dearly for it. Basically you're on your own, and good luck to you.
> Forcing folks to use niche software
Forcing anyone to use any software is wrong. Software should be a choice in the same way that religion, diet, political affiliation and our choice of friends. There is not only one way. Understanding that there are choices - alternative ways of doing things - is fundamental to innovation and should be taught to kids from a very young age.
> they cannot just use whatever the rest of the world is using
That is a disingenuous generalisation. There is no "rest of the world".
> when they graduate.
One thing I've learned over many years of teaching tech, is that by the time students graduate and get into a real job market the things that were hot when they were freshmen have moved on. Google services have been axed. Adobe versions and licenses have changed. Microsoft applications moved into the cloud and radically changed their interfaces. It is actually Free Open Source Software that retains greater stability and offers greater career value longevity, even it is is functionally poorer.
> Teachers, parents, students, etc would need to learn these new programs that they haven't used before.
In tech, we all have to learn new things we haven't used before, all the time. It's the nature of rapid progress. To infer that this is somehow only true of open source software is wrong.
> I'm sure there will be a lot of school sysadmins reading this and thinking "please just stay in your lane."
We have a massive problem with de-skilling of ICT admins at the primary, secondary, and even higher-ed levels. I believe this is a direct cause of poorer educational outcomes because the technical support staff are unable to serve needs in a rapidly advancing world that demands innovation and deeper skills than clicking boxes on a webmin panel to choose some Windows options.
This is exactly what Microsoft got right: establishing themselves as the standard. Their OS on the PC, their OS on the laptop, and their suite in the offices. Deals with governments, deals with schools, and then, you're the idiot if you want to use something else compared to "whatever the rest of the world is using".
I do agree about turnkey solutions though. This is what MS got right, and also I think what Red Hat and Canonical got right.
Well said. Most institutions and organizations need and would prefer turnkey long-term solutions.
Well exactly - if you want to tackle this ‘problem’ then first you have to understand why LibreOffice isn’t a replacement (because you need to replace Google Docs not Word.)
A lot of school IT staff I've met in the UK are not at the cutting edge. Many of them are older, have an out of date skill set, and don't get regular training - there's just not the budget for it, and many schools would baulk at paying market rates for talented, up to date support staff / management.
>discriminates against poorer families
I agree just funny.
I'd argue PDF is equally problematic as it is often designed for A4 paper format, and this not easily readable on mobile devices, which poorer families are more likely to have as main computing device.
This was also a school who won an award for it's cyber security. More than once I found full student rosters with username/password printed out sitting on the teacher's desk.
I suppose this is a different rant than school's should use FOSS. I don't think schools should impose a digital footprint on their very young as students.
I have no children and no longer work in education.
> IT departments could opt to use any one of the lightweight Linux distros available.
Which one? That is the problem and don't get me started on tech support.
This screams completely out of touch.
The reason for that could have to do with schools. It could change if schools changed.
There are good arguments on both sides of this issue, but this one (which comes up repeatedly) is not among them. It's absurd to argue that elementary schools should design their curriculum exclusively to train students for the job market.
All I am saying is that when non tech savvy people are working with software there is a high likelihood that they will be using the above software.
Even if it is for the job market, I doubt a hiring manager would take a look twice at LibreOffice or even GIMP in a candidate's CV.
Unfortunately Microsoft and Adobe or any other proprietary software is an expectation in some industries outside of the software industry.
Also, they don't want to learn? Seriously? Since can people get away with not wanting to do their jobs?
I hate to break this to you, but because (especially for PowerPoint) these are legitimately among the best options, at the very least, distinctly better than any open-source office offerings. Maybe the author is unaware of how well these programs do in their roles because they've been actively avoiding any situation that would call for the use of these or similar programs... the use of a plain text document, not even a lightly-formatted HTML document, makes me think that they actively go out of their way to avoid using a word processor.
This might also be because a plain text document is much more portable (even without needing a web browser to display them, but also can be displayed in a web browser too if wanted) and does not have the mess of formatting of modern HTML. (I often write many of my own documents as plain text files, too.)
I do agree, however, that public entities should lean on open-source software where possible. It's our tax money that's paying for all those licenses. I see no point in govt agencies requiring windows licenses when most of the work can be done through the Office suite in a web browser.
The point is there's someone to sue when things go wrong. I'm not being facetious.
If government runs Gentoo and it turns out there's a decades-old bug in polkit that gets chained with an 0day that results in everyone's social security numbers getting leaked, who's responsible?
If that happens with Microsoft they can in theory sue, and more importantly they can blame Microsoft in the media.
I recently had to write some doc that utilized a lot of fanciness of word
and no, web office feels like a demo version of desktop.
Both plans were the battle zone between Microsoft and open source software community.
For the first plan, the government started a project named Huayra Linux, a debian derivate with a bunch of software designed here for the kids. For Sarmiento, it came with a debian tweaked installation, that was barely working because the closed source of the wimax chipset (it was only working for windows, and yes, the students had free internet in the city)
The battle was so hard, that Microsoft licensed the windows distribution for 1 dollar each, and they got a contract where all the machines must to be installed with windows.
Despite a lot of trials and errors, a lot of work without a project to learn from (maybe ceybal from uruguay is the closest example of a really well project) and the scale (I'm talking about millions of notebooks) I'm sure that open source software is the best from a IT perspective, from social perspective and with the best margin to build things that your school, your students, your city or country needs.
What they told me was that similar pitches from vendors like RedHat were useful to them in that they invariably prompted Microsoft to offer a deal, IIRC, somewhere around 1$/month/computer (annually, about the cost of a new keyboard; which they had to buy a lot of), and that they had to replace the computer hardware often enough due to wear and tear (students are very hard on computers) that the hardware savings would be illusory.
If I were to try and make a similar pitch today I might try calculating in the cost of electricity, but there is simply no way Microsoft is going to let itself be undercut on price for the software per-se for those big marquee accounts.
Of course when taking competitive bids like that, you really should price in the eventual switching costs when comparing bids, but hardly anyone does that correctly in the public OR private sector, and sunk-cost fallacies tends to overwhelm the decision making process.
1. School staff is not tech savy. They can not install or manage open source easily.
2. They mostly prefer commercial software with paid support. Software is critical to them but not their main business. They lack expertise and willingness to go for Open source software.
But there's commercial free software with paid support.
Give me an OSS alternative to Google Workspace and I'll move today.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_collaborative_software...
However, their Standard plan (which is the one that has Office-like apps) is actually more expensive than what I pay now on G, so there's literally no incentive for me to switch.
Also, I just remembered. The Sonoma County Office of Education is already using Zimbra as its groupware. I wouldn't write it off entirely either.
Most paid support is awful.
I keep telling my wife, “I still cannot believe that a multinational ADVERTISING company is being used to “teach” kids”. It is so incredibly stupid when you look at it for what it is.
I hope Larry and Sergey are loving this monster they created.
Gimp is really not adequate for everyday usage compared with Photoshop? Really?
LibreOffice/OpenOffice doesn't provide adequate alternatives to spreadsheet/doc/csv? Really?
Notepad++ is not good enough of a text editor? Really?
One semi valid criticism is that there isn't a support infrastructure to help organizations with their open source needs. While I don't believe it on it's face, regardless, this is an opportunity to push for that infrastructure and to help every single FOSS project with funding to support the community needs.
Public infrastructure should not be captured by vendor lock-in.
For one off, simple jobs, used sparingly…those FOSS alternatives are fine.
If I need to spend more than 10 minutes of time using them…I’m frustrated beyond measure at their UX issues.
Learn a spreadsheet, pick up any spreadsheet easily for the rest of your life.
Seems to me the only reason to push FOSS in that case is for activism purposes over any real value to the student.
Not to mention any so-called deficiencies could be remedied in two years by directing 1% of the budget from private jets to FLOSS.
Not sure there are too many school districts with private jets, but if you are referring to the corporate software publishers, i am pretty sure there would be much better things to spend 1% on other than supporting FOSS to benefit and support society.
I don't think that either Photoshop or GIMP meet this for the vast majority of students and classes. I definitely could see some advanced students and high school courses making use it, though.
I think LibreOffice and Notepad++ are just fine and could be used as a drop-in replacement.
In terms of the specific pieces of software, I don't think Photoshop is so much easier to learn than GIMP and GIMP has the added benefit of being libre/free and gratis. There's also Krita [0].
Yes, really. You may as well be comparing calc.exe to Excel, same comparison.
The rest of the teachers and actually many of the students too were not technically inclined enough to be able to deal with the issues that can come up in open source software, and that would've for sure overwhelmed the like two IT dudes who were already busy regularly having to fix projectors and SmartBoard problems
Alas, only Chrome and Google-based applications are allowed; however, it's a good step away from more expensive products.
https://press.stripe.com/the-dream-machine
If we're going to be adults about the thing-- Developing technology requires global or at least national stability. Global stability traditionally has, "required" global hegemony. Developing technology allows the United States and her allies to to remain technically ahead of competing nations which in a feedback loop allows for the development of further technology. There's a sideways argument that in truth, in some sense, that the technology we, "ought" (Hume) to be using in schools should be, "nationalized" in the same sense that the, "internet" as a tangible infrastructure is a, "national" resource. Imagine a kind of Sudbury School where children use advanced, "democracy computers" to, "rehearse" avid citizenship given the political constraints of our society. The computer could facilitate a social revolution in an educational setting if used in this manner. I really do think this is what Alan C. Kay is talking about when he says, "the computing revolution hasn't happened yet."
Also HyperCard! and Project Xanadu! and Blackjack! and Hookers! (Exclamation point!)
What does this mean?
Consider an alternative-- a kind of digital space where a young person can utilize a digitally interactive experience to rehearse morally challenging situations or to practice good citizenship in an intellectually and aesthetically stimulating manner. The idea is that this kind of machine might have the ability to revolutionize education by facilitating the self-learning of sophisticated moral concepts.
Consider the critical intersection between contemporary politics, education, and computers. In Europe the result of continually increasing rates of literacy as a result of the invention of moveable type resulted in critical political and social revolutions (The American Revolution being one of them). The question is-- could a sophisticated form of dynamic media facilitate a kind of sociopolitical revolution or paradigm shift in human culture? Following from the invention and proliferation of print it seems possible.
It's also worthwhile to consider what Socrates said about books (...) Do kids need a sophisticated machine to play make believe? I don't think so personally.
$0 for the software, $500k/year for the IT support staff necessary to maintain an entire school's worth of Linux machines.
Or just buy a Chromebook.
I went with
wget https://tdarb.org/ -O - | markdown | lynx -stdin
This is why simple styling plus a printer-friendly page work wonders.
Right now we don't see it. GSuite will completely take Microsoft's place in corporate environments in the next 10 years. All my peers entering the workforce right now love Google docs and detest Word. It's just a matter of time for when that age bracket becomes the decision makers.
https://www.saasgenius.com/blog/why-office-365-is-overtaking...
O365 is a mess, with Excel online I can’t even create a named range, something so basic that has been in Google Sheets since day one. As an example.
Looking backwards in history, Nazi Germany and Soviet police states are good examples of why having people know too much about you can get you killed, depending on political system.
Looking at the present, people's jobs and political careers are destroyed for having said things which were mainstream views a half-century ago. Statues are torn down of people who held perfectly mainstream views 150 years ago. I have no idea which of the things my child says and knows now will be taboo in another 50 years. I do know the schools are storing all of that in archives with a whole bunch of fly-by-night ed-tech vendors.
I don't know how this is going to end, but mark my words: This will end badly. We have a history and a present of persecuting people for less, and privacy is what protects us.
But that's not what's profitable.
"Microsoft Word" is generally fine because we have Google and Libreoffice, etc. An important note I'd include is -- we probably have these things because of the pressure of the free and open source software that does exist.
But what I primarily want to mention is that there is a looming uncertain threat of dangerously restrictive software that is not practically open enough. This is the "LMS." Canvas, Blackboard et al. This is where the energy and pressure of FOSS type principles needs to be pointed at today.
If I were school governor I'd be running everything on Chromebooks by now. Free storage, sync and applications.
And if cost is an issue, that is more an indictment of how schools are funded: if there doesn’t seem to be room in the budget for buying software and/or support, why is that the budget?
For schools, I'd definitely love to see open hardware, if not just to give the kids a chance to understand the chips that run the software as well.
I'd say, teach kids some actually foundational CS and IT basics (binary number conversion, imperative programming, OSI model,...), similar to how math is taught, maybe show them the basics of SSH connections, package managers, shell scripting,..., but don't mix in tech discussions with other classes that are supposed to teach them language skills, geography knowledge,...
Windows 10 and defender does a bloody good job of blocking lots of malware. Think of tools like mimikatz. You don't see Ubuntu blocking a mimikatz-like binaries.
Firefox is slower compared to Chrome. People care about speed. Firefox is also not privacy friendly. Lots of telemetry to mozilla/google.
You are out of touch and have embraced the cult that is Linux, Open Source. I don't understand why the algorithm pushes your post to the top.
Having a school system transition to raspberry pi’s sounds like a capped nightmare.
Most schools do not have the financial resources to hire a system administrator who can maintain an open-source architecture or the technical shops in house to maintain one themselves. From their point of view, the freedom and flexibility granted by an open source framework is a cost, not a benefit. It means there's no right answer to how to do it, so when they screw up (and they inevitably will screw up regardless of what infrastructure they use), they don't have a standard, closed source architecture to point to to shift blame.
From their point of view, closed source versus open source is irrelevant because the two are equivalently opaque to them.
Given all of that, there is probably meat on the bones for a company that chooses to use a fully open source stack to build solutions for schools, and the schools willing to invest in the resources to do the work in the house will be able to grow from that open source solution to when they maintain. But that does put the company who goes that road at the disadvantage of every customer being a potential competitor in the future...
https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/how-switching-linux-ba...
Most of the students I see use their phones as the main Web access device (zoom online classes + video lessons + pdf files for documents and all). Touch screen/direct manipulation UI is were it seems to be at. Students like drawing on my slides. I work with a teacher who makes extensive use of Google's Jamboard (Please don't cancel this project!!!) to check understanding. Each student in an online class of 10 can have a copy of a problem on their own page in Jamboard and show their working.
One of my employers IT dept (Microsoft shop all through, 1500+ client PCs) was happy to make OpenOffice(*)/GIMP/Inkscape available on the network. Students discovered the packages themselves and some used them without realising that they could have their own copies at home for nowt.
The other employer has gone Microsoft 365 total with Teams and all. The Web based office applications allow students to produce basic docs and keep the resulting files in their online storage. Few problems so far. Some integration with Moodle for course pages.
A large College locally uses Google Education to provide similar facilities. Students who take courses from both institutions seem to work well with the two different systems. I think people in these days of mobile devices are less dependent on one UI.
Addressing the OA's main point: yes I think we could use more open source OS and applications in schools. Chromebooks are almost there when you think about it. BUT I suspect the future is Web apps. Contrast geogebra(1) with Logo(2) (and I think there is room for both)
(1) https://www.geogebra.org/calculator
(2) https://el.media.mit.edu/logo-foundation/what_is_logo/logo_p...
Meta: I had to use links -dump https://tdarb.org/posts/schools.txt | fmt | less
to read the OA. Lines just too long on graphical Web browser.
PS. Why is this post a .txt file? I can't even click the links.
Something like VS Code works nicely but costs nothing.
If there's a budget problem in schools there's certainly software that can be used without paying for it.
"Schools should only be allowed to use and teach with open source software."
So that's be freedom for thee but not for me. Good to know.
It's time, at least for public services, to came back to the old classic model: hw have to be paid, sw is free code. And that's not different for services: any public service must relay only on public services. So, for instance, no AWS etc.
It's DEFINITIVELY not a long shot, is a thing that should already be there and now is hard just because too many was too lazy in the past.
BTW the same principle apply to weapons: beside private hand weapons and ammo all others must be ONLY a PUBLIC-ONLY show with the State that have internal research, production etc to avoid lobby pushes to go to war for business reasons.
You want every state to be an expert in the literally dozens of areas that they need software?
So now you’re taking budget in the public education system away from teachers to hire developers and hoping the public sector can do a better job. Not even the private sector is dumb enough to bring software development and IT in house for things that are out of its core competency.
The government is just going to outsource support and contracts to the private sector even if they do use open source. Meet the new boss…
For me money MUST BE a unit of measure, NOT a value loaned by few private scammer to the public, having invented the public debt [1], so government MUST GENERATE the money they need and public development simply costs the amount of resources it demand. There is nothing to outsource.
Of course in the actual scam economy, where money are hold by a small private criminals who loan them know mathematically that interests can't be paid and are just a way to control people through a powerless puppet government, that's might be an issue, but:
- such issue must be resolved anyway
- costs are not high at all, just look at the European past, where public research was normal, ALL COSTS was far less than now for far better results. Just look about health: USA with it's private system have the most expensive health services with the least quality compared to EU, not only ANY EU country have seen health costs climb as privatizations climb, lowering regularly the quality of the service.
That's is. There is no new boss, we must remember that in Democracy WE are the boss-es of the society.
[1] https://www.heritage-history.com/index.php?c=read&author=car... look at the end of the page, Ikelheimer is a good keyword to see their "business points"
No. The push back comes from management. In a university in Eastern europe (20 years ago) people were using what was available: unix on servers (sun, linux, BSD) and DOS and some windows 3.1 then 95 and NT on PCs. Windows was pirated like the majority of windows software. Then the law made SW piracy a felony. And as the law began to be enforced, MS came and made agreements with the university to distribute the MS software for free to students and to teach classes with Microsoft products. This was during the times when Linux was a "cancer" and "communism". The IT professionals must dance as the management sings.
If you don't have a team of skilled people who are willing and able to support OSS, then I firmly believe you shouldn't be using it.
When I have critical bugs and outages I scramble to ask devs and OSS community for help. Sometimes I get help quick, other times it is months before anyone even has time to look at it. My priority is not mainatainers' priority. Not should it be. I have no feeling of entitlement to receive support/help and I am totally grateful for any given.
Most HNers are devs/swe and of the startup/FAANG culture. In IT/Ops at orgs that have tech only to support their main objectives, this is how a bug/issue is handled: You get a ticket opened with the vendor and they fix it, maybe you get on a call with them asap. You have a need? If you pay them enough they will deliver. Is their product too hard to support? Or maybe it is just fine. IT folks bitch about it a bit and spend their time evaluating alternatives for the upcoming contract renewal. They don't fork things or create PRs.
We use a product I won't name from a FAANG and their support is like OSS support as is the UX of it. I can tolerate it but everyone else complain and struggle so much with it!
I had a critical feature needed for an OSS product, I searched and begged. Finally I forked an existing solution and got it to work (still works) but I can't upstream my work because it is now deprecated and they decided to do things differently (but not complete enough to meet my needs). I had another critical issue that caused many problems. I opened issues and talked to the devs a lot, eventually a kind dev recently worked with me to get it fixed after many months. I am fine with it, knew what I was getting into and accept the state of OSS. But good luck finding people that will do this full time and meet uptime/support SLA/KPI. It can be done, I have worked at a tech company with an army of devs and engineers do wonders with OSS. But having woked in a small and big teams outside of tech... yeah..I stand by my sentiment about accepting the state and support cost of OSS upfront.
It is not OSS fault if you don't understand what you are getting into beforehand. Some of my favorite OSS that I support have bad reputation which I have and still am trying to fight because people thought it would be like commercial enterprise software: Install and you are done. Have issues? Call support. Developer suddenly decides to something random that affects you? Complain and threaten with some legal b.s. , that won't work in OSS. You need one or two people that are essentially contributing devs to the OSS software you plan on using.
It only harms OSS when you promote it without understanding the requirements of your target audience.
This statement is false. In my company it is used all the time for any image manipulations, by both graphic designers and managers. Last time I've seen photoshop was maybe in 2007 or so.
Pretty much almost every photograph that you see on a media company website has been touched, color corrected, cropped or otherwise digitally manipulated by Photoshop.
Personally I've worked in VFX, Internet, medical companies, and while there were a few things got photoshoped here and there externally we almost always used something else, whether expensive or free.
I’ll admit it’s value was greater when print publishing was still a thing, but those magazine and newspaper companies that transitioned to digital didn’t necessarily go out and buy all new tools to replace effective tools that already existed, already had a trained base, and already had robust digital asset workflows in place.
I was speaking photo manipulation and I stand by what I said. In the US it’s the tool that is present in every art department of every major media company and advertising agency to manipulate digital photos.
It is true that many people have very limited awareness about options available to them, and thus select the only tool they know. It doesn't mean that their choice is best for their tasks. It is just lack of awareness.
Pros select the tools they need to do their job very intentionally and are likely extremely aware of the alternatives. If I spend 8 hours a day correcting and manipulating photos and choose photoshop as my tool of choice instead of latest random FOSS alternative that is a favorite of some dude who occasionally touches up a photo, my decision might have some weighted reasoning behind it.
But hey, if you have something you feel is better, use it.