Linux for schools: why use Ubuntu for education | Hacker News Reader

Linux for schools: why use Ubuntu for education

ubuntu.com

16 pointsjlpcsl21 comments

Anything but Ubuntu. They willingly have way too many "open source politics shenanigans" to be considered viable for the first taste of Linux. (Have been burned a few too many times by trying to do even simple things like installing Steam, not even having an image with restricted extras already installed, and how happy the team is to kill user apps like Wine over and over).

Compared to other distros like Manjaro or Mint, I consider Ubuntu as "Given Up".

Active Directory is allegedly supported in Ubuntu so that makes it seems most ready for fleet deployment for existing edu IT teams.

Active directory is supported by most distros. Either via winbind or the more modern sssd.

Supported in what sense? I meant that you could pay Ubuntu for support beyond it being pre-baked into the distro, which seems rare if not exclusive to Ubuntu.

I use mint but for an educational institution Ubuntu makes a ton of sense due to the premium support options

After using Manjaro for a good 2 months I'd pick Mint over Manjaro any day of the week. I'm moving back to plain Arch or maybe i'll try out Garuda since I'm gonna do btrfs and wayland.

for education Fedora would be my pick.

/ramble over

Teaching kids how to use computers with programs and operating systems they will never come across again in their whole life. That is a really good idea.

Harsh? Wouldn’t it be good to socialise kids into FOSS?

I would rather prepare them for real life.

Oh, just hand them your shovel?

Why read Shakespeare when you can read Twitter?

Why go for extremes when there are more sensible options?

I prefer the option which is most optimal, and I've used an analogy to show why yours is not.

All operating systems are pretty much the same. I switched from Windows to Ubuntu on my parents computer and they didn't notice any difference.

Probably most of the OS or program-specific stuff they’re learning in school will be out of date when they’d profit from using it anyways. Children need to learn more general concepts, otherwise they end up like my mom suffering every time windows decides to change the UI.

For that matter, mixing windows and Linux might be even better since they’ll need to adapt and transfer knowledge (although this would probably be painful and exhausting for everyone involved)

Microsoft changes the GUI in each version of Windows with no rhyme or reason. If you’re teaching kids to memorize the exact GUI layouts instead of vendor neutral computing principles or the actual lesson content the school is doing it wrong.

We should be teaching kids how to teach themselves how to use new programs - not rote memorization of the UI for the current versions of windows, adobe, etc….the last thing we need is generations of tech illiterates that are slaves to “industry standard” proprietary software

Should schools use a mobile OS like Android or iPhone since that's most popular especially for school age?

Whatever they have reasonable chances to use as grownups. Ubuntu is not it.

Most adults also use mobile OS which are needlessly restrictive in terms of productivity software, even compared to Ubuntu, so it can't be just that or we would put the kids on Android and iPhone, don't all/99% adults use them?

EDIT: also how do you not think that Ubuntu using kids won't go on to use this free tooling in the future? MS spends a ton to target the education market because they know that you can get kids hooked early you get easier wins.

Having a familiarity with linux isn't a bad idea, it introduces them to the command line.

This may be an essential skill to have in this era of automation with LLMs. People who have never programmed before are writing cli scripts to save time and enhance their work.

Ubuntu is easier for beginners to program with, and Windows has WSL so the skills can transfer over.

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