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.
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.
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.