There are many good reasons for using open source and linux at school. In this blog, I would like to give you some insight on why we chose linux.
Before we go into any details some facts about our school:
~ 800 students (5th grade to 12th grade / age 10 to 18)
~ 80 teachers
~ 120 workstations running ubuntu
6 workstations still running windows 7 (4 administration, 2 for video editing)
We used to have windows on all of our workstations. At that time maintenance effort was very high. Keeping the machines up to date - not only windows but also the installed programs. Keeping their images for deployment up to date was quite an effort, especially when you get new hardware.
With Linux we do not need any images any more. We just install from scratch - which also works on new hardware. Installation is automated, so that there a no manual steps involved. Updating a linux machine is easy: apt-get update && apt-get upgrade This also updates all the packages/programs installed.
On a windows machine you install the updates and then one also needs to check for updates on all the individual programs that were installed, as it still does not have an app store. Even if you have a WSUS server which “enables administrators to manage the distribution of updates and hotfixes released for Microsoft products” you probably want updates for firefox/flash/java …
2.) Computer viruses
So far we did not have any problems with computer viruses on any of our linux machines. I am aware that one reason for fewer viruses on linux is, that it is not that wide spread - it just helps :-) However there are also technical reasons. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_malware ). On pretty much any teacher/student windows machine, that I see, the user has administrator privileges - interesting concept :-).
In addition we do not need any anti-virus software. In the pre linux era we did have anti virus software, which is also very resource intensive (disk I/O, cpu…) - especially on older machines.
3.) Licenses
We do not need to pay/update/maintain any licenses for our linux machines. So we could/would save money here. However this is not the main argument here - as the Austrian ministry of education pays for windows/office licenses. But if you have a windows only environment you will need a KMS server and it is very likely that you also have additional software for which you need to pay (Acronis, Symantec ghost/anti virus, Adobe creative suite…) Maintaining licenses is also time consuming.
Most important though, I can pass on any of the software we use to our students/teachers. Open Source software is available to anyone, independent of his/her financial background, which shoudl be an argument for schools.
4.) Privacy
Windows 10 and many other commercial software products are a privacy nightmare. Of course some of that stuff can be turned off - however this is time consuming and some of the settings are overwritten after updates. Open Source software is not spying on us. We want to create awareness for that and Linux and Open Source software make that more credible.
More details here:
5.) Community support
For commercial products you usually pay for support and to be eligible for a longer period of time you often have to pay a yearly fee. There are Open Source products that also offer commercial support. However the community support is more than good enough, to get answers to any of the questions that come up. It is fun to actively participate in the free software community - give and take as a role model for students.
6.) Simple Self-healing workstations
All of our linux workstations are self-healing. So when students/teachers log in they can change anything they have permission for - of course they do not have administrator privileges. When they log out/shutdown or reboot the machine all the changes made are reverted. All this comes for free with overlayfs (See https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/filesystems/overlayfs.txt). There are (expensive) commercial alternatives for Windows (e.g HDGuard) however they are by far not as convenient as overlayfs.
7.) Software that makes linux so great:
Of course the package manager, which makes it easy to update not only the os, but all the installed software. Installing new software is easy as well
Clusterssh: ClusterSSH is a tool for making the same change on multiple machines at
the same time.
SSH/Bash/scripting possibilities: ssh to connect to any machine; ssh tunnels and X11 forwarding, to automate stuff…(See https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Bash_Shell_Scripting)the same time.
These are our main reasons, on why we are preferring linux over microsoft windows.
Interessting reads on this topic:
https://www.gnu.org/education/edu-schools.en.htmlhttp://s-seitz.de/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Open-Source-und-Schule.pdf
https://opensource.com/education/14/9/teachers-linux-open-source-education
https://opensource.com/education/13/7/linux-westcliff-high-school
