Convincing a school district to migrate from OS X to Ubuntu or Edubuntu

[Christopher Chan]

CLIFFORD ILKAY wrote:
> David McNally wrote:
>> I know that it is weird to see Macs that often, and in fact, I rarely
>> see them outside of my school.
> 
> You lead a sheltered life then. A significant part of the attendees at
> any tech conference I've attended in the last few years were carrying
> Apple's notebooks. Apple has made huge inroads amongst developers and it
> is also doing so amongst younger people. The iPod has introduced a new
> generation to Apple's products. Here is a real conversation overheard by
> one of my brothers on the subway a few months ago between two teenagers:
> 
> Teenager 1: Did you know that Apple started making computers? I'm going
> to get a MacBook for my birthday. It's just as slick as an iPod.
> 
> Teenager 2: Kewl.
> 
> I read a few months ago that 33 cents of every dollar spent on
> back-to-school notebook purchases in the U.S. were spent on Apple
> products and Apple's notebooks constituted 20 per cent of the total unit
> sales. Apple saw double-digit gains in sales over the same time last
> year whereas all the other vendors, who are killing one another to eke
> out a 5% margin compared to Apples 25% or better, were flat. That is a
> pretty impressive achievement for Apple, especially in a down economy.

/me shrugs. We have a few iMacs in the Music room. That is it. Some 
teachers have macbooks. Maybe we will get another one for the future 
video studio if that ever gets off the ground. I have an older G5 iMac 
at home too. SO? The school balked at getting Macs. Maybe the Year 6 
kids will have to bring their own Macs...they will need it at the next 
school they will probably go to which requires their students to bring 
macs for school. Guess what I get to roll out instead of Windows and Mac 
OS X?

> 
> [snip]
>> Of course, lunch is an important part
>> of the school day all around the world, and would function more properly
>> if it were running on Linux,
> 
> I prefer my lunch to be quite still and not running, thank you.

I prefer my lunch system to not go through what the London Stock 
Exchange and many others that run Windows went through.

> 
>> but it's not the only part (I know that you
>> said that, I'm just agreeing with you). If schools were able to run
>> everything on Linux, everything would work smoother, considering the
>> smoothness that Linux provides.
>>
>> I have, however, noticed that Microsoft and Apple do better at making
>> sure that the computer works rather well than the Linux community.
> [snip]
>> There are similar problems that I've found in Linux. Obviously, I still
>> think that Ubuntu would beat Windows or OS X any day, but it's not
>> perfect, and it never will be. It still has many more advantages than
>> Windows or OS X.
> 
> If I were your teacher, you'd be asked to revise and resubmit because
> the inconsistencies in what you wrote are glaring. How is it "obvious"
> that Linux is better if "Microsoft and Apple do better at making sure
> that the computer works rather well than the Linux community"?

Forgive him. He has not had to try to fix somebody else's group policy + 
roaming profile mess and other Microsoft only rubbish like campus wide 
viral infections. He does not know what he is talking about.

> 
>> Clifford has pointed out that he has already gotten students using
>> Linux. This comes as a total shock to me, as I've always gone to school
>> to Macs. I still remember using very old versions of the Macintosh OS
>> (definately pre-OS X) back in kindergarten, and up into the first few
>> years of elementary school.
>>
>> Clifford then pointed out how much work it has taken to move his school
>> to using just a few Linux machines and mostly Windows machines.
> 
> No, it's the other way around. By the time we are finished, the majority
> of the machines in the school will be running Linux, not Windows. Like
> most schools, we have more computers being used for teaching than for
> school administration.

Whatcha running?

> 
>> If this
>> will need such dedication from everyone involved, then moving this
>> school, which has been on Macintosh since before I was born, will be
>> more work than most schools. People here are also very stubborn,
>> especially IT.
> 
> Their resistance to change is understandable and not necessarily a bad
> thing. You can't and shouldn't discount years of experience and
> infrastructure and claim that Linux is magically going to make
> everything better when you're talking about shades of grey difference
> between OS X and Linux. OS X has some definite advantages over Linux and
> the converse is also true. In other words, it's not a clear, decisive
> win for Linux when competing against OS X. Against Windows, in most
> cases, it's much easier to justify Linux.

??? You get desktop profiles on Macs? You get a package manager on Macs? 
  Okay, you are probably going to find support for some stuff on Mac OS 
X but not on Linux like Activstudio...but is Mac OS X desktop/system 
management really that much better than Linux distros like Ubuntu?

> 
>> There's no question that Ubuntu would be able to work on these
>> computers. While some of them are old, they're still new enough to run
>> Ubuntu. The school has big metal carts that hold about 30 notebooks
>> (these carts are called 'COWs', short for 'Computers On Wheels'), which
>> are usually filled with rather new notebooks, but only because the
>> notebooks are the first things to fall apart, with keys falling out and
>> plastic casing coming off. Such new notebooks would be able to run
>> Ubuntu quite well. The desktops here are also quite good, though,
>> because the school tries to spend more money on the desktops, knowing
>> that they will die long after a notebook bought at the same time, so
>> those will be able to run Ubuntu quite well, too.
>>
>> Saving money is nice, but changing the way an entire high school uses
>> computers is hard, no matter how much money it saves.
> 
> That's because they may not save any money at all if the cost of
> retraining and the loss of productivity during the transition period
> exceeds the cost of software licenses. This is the TCO (Total Cost of
> Ownership) argument, which is an argument that Apple is very experienced
> at making.
> 

A one time pain. Don't forget to make training videos and make them 
available over the network! It will all be over in a year or two! 
TCO...hah! Who does TCO over a decade?