Fw: Ubuntu for School (epic93dude at gmail.com)

[Simón Ruiz]

On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 10:22 PM, Joseph Hartman <jlhartman at gmail.com> wrote:
> No, unfortunately for 200 self-standing computers the cost would be $12,000
> per year.

Whoah. I would not suggest Landscape on all your desktops. I don't
think that's what it's for.

Frankly, switching OS's for a school will be hard for a lot of the
same reasons as it is for a person: inertia and experience. The
majority of the resistance is psychological, the fear of the unknown.

Add to that curriculum and specialized hardware that may require
specific pieces of Windows-only software to work, legitimate concerns
in a place where the computers are only there to support the
educational process.

I don't think you can expect to make the switch all at once, I could
see that being a catastrophic failure regardless of which O.S. you'd
be changing from or to.

We've replaced most of the back-end of our school's computer systems
with Linux without Landscape (of course, we've got more than 4 hours a
week to spend on this), but would have a hard time switching
everyone's desktops out from under them. We've got one classroom/lab
that is Ubuntu only, and one that dual-boots, so far.

In our particular situation, we've been slowly replacing bits and
pieces of the desktop with Free Software where we can so that, when
switch time comes, our users will already be experienced using those
tools.

I don't think we'd pull a Google
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/7792685/Google-bans-Microsoft-Windows-on-office-computers.html>

We'd probably introduce the switch by making it an option on the
existing computers, and simply stop buying Windows licenses for new
computers, except where specifically requested for good reasons
(expecting that, over time, those incidences become rarer and rarer).

Simón