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

[Bart Silverstrim]

David McNally wrote:
> Hi everyone:
> 
> It's been about 24 hours since I first put up this post, so I wanted to
> reply to everyone who's replied to my original post.

I've stayed largely out of this, but some points are tickling the base 
of my brain. First question back to you, and forgive me if you've 
already answered it, but what is your stake in this conversion? Are you 
in their IT department, school board, parent, student...?

> First, I'll answer the message from Allen Meyers:
> I know that it is weird to see Macs that often, and in fact, I rarely see
> them outside of my school. 

Oddly enough Apple's slated to possibly have the best quarter they've 
had in selling Macs. They're a minority and market to upscale home 
consumers, but they're weathering the current economic problems 
relatively well compared to other individual vendors.

Just a side note. That, and I just bought a coal stove from a place that 
specialized in home heating and their point of sale system was 
Mac-based...I thought that was kind of surprising.

> I agree with you, not only on the fact that food service in schools would be
> better served by Linux, but, rather, that everything in schools would be
> better served by Linux. 

Little known fact: organizations, or at least their administration, 
really really like having software that is supported by someone they can 
call on the phone and scream at, especially if it's cheap. I know you 
*can* get support for various distros, and sometimes various apps on 
Linux...I think...I rarely see it.

Most vendors invest resources...expensive resources...into developing 
for systems that will be bought. They don't want to spend lots of cash 
on turnkey Linux systems necessarily unless it makes business sense, so 
they will make more money focusing on software. So they make it for what 
platforms they'll find in the majority of their target market...most 
likely Windows. OS X is growing, and if it makes sense they'll 
cross-platform it and they can support another platform like the Mac, 
but again they have to weigh that against paying for their developers 
and tech support to be familiar with that platform and their issues 
along with the base platform.

But Linux can be supported in-house!

Yeah. Here's another fun fact. Schools pay below average salaries. I 
know! Sounds preposterous. Truth is that a comp-sci grad could get a 
developer job or admin job for 40 to 50 grand a year within a year or 
two in most corporations. Schools have IT departments paying anywhere 
from 15 to 30, and you don't get big raises from that unless you have an 
administrator (not system administrator, but organizational 
administrator) title.

Good luck attracting a computer geek that is familiar with Linux, enjoys 
digging into Linux-centric issues, while supporting Mrs. Jones who can't 
figure out how to print from some Macromedia or flash program from the 
back of a textbook. For twenty grand a year. Or thirty.

>If schools were able to run everything on Linux,
> everything would work smoother, considering the smoothness that Linux
> provides.

Linux itself may be relatively smooth. Good luck with applications, 
though (you know, why you need the computer in the first place?). I ran 
a Linux server with Metadot web portal server on it. Did an update on 
the server, and the portal stopped working. Something with the way the 
code was written it didn't like one of the newer modules. Took me over 
an hour to get that unraveled.

These things take skill to support. Generally you can't retain good 
talent without compensating them for it...and most schools won't do 
that. Even if they get someone to do this the talent moves on to greener 
pastures, leaving them with technology they can't support. So they get 
the people who generally are cheaper hire and more plentiful in the 
pool...typically windows-using fresh-faced hires from college in search 
of a job. First point of business...the moment that "Linux-thing" acts 
up, replace it with something they know. Or something with a vendor that 
will set it up and support it for them.

Which I can't blame them for since the IT departments in most schools 
are understaffed.

> I have, however, noticed that Microsoft and Apple do better at making sure
> that the computer works rather well than the Linux community. It's harder to
> explain this than most things explained on this forum, but I've noticed
> problems with Linux that would never happen with an operating system that
> came from Redmond or Cupertino. For example, I've noticed that I've gotten
> error messages with occasional typographicalr errors. 

While bad from a marketing view, there are plenty of applications that 
have typos in their error messages. There are websites dedicated to such 
gaffes.

I don't know if you can have a typo in a blue screen of death. The whole 
thing looks like a typo.

>While this isn't so
> important, it's the kind of thing that would set a very bad first impression
> on people new to Linux, especially educators. 

Wrong. Most educators...most users...the vast majority of users...blank 
out when what they perceive to be an error occurs. They don't read the 
error. I have had people call with problems where I say, "What was the 
error?"

"I don't know..."

They just don't care to know or want to know so when it happens they 
swear, call someone if they are available to "make it go", and move on 
with their work.

You're thinking that people *care* about their operating system. It's 
like assuming people are buying cars because of the quality of the drive 
train. Fundamental, important, but more important to the buyer is the 
color of the interior.

> 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.

For who? Computer geeks? System administrators?

Or end users that care more about pretty things than function?

End users don't care *how* their job gets done. They just want to get 
their job done, and strongly prefer it be in a familiar way...like, say, 
using their home computer.

And you also need to keep in mind in education that teachers and 
students are forever "finding" programs they want installed (from their 
book publishers or teaching conferences) that will not run under linux 
without using VirtualBox or if the silicon gods are smiling on you Wine. 
Wanna teach teachers to use virtual machine software?

> I'd also like to mention that this school has no difficulty buying software,
> but, that doesn't mean that it should spend so much money on software when
> it could be spent on better teachers or newer textbooks or better food or
> something else productive. I agree with Paige on this one again: moving away
> from software that a school can't afford (or can, but shouldn't) is always a
> good idea.

But you miss the idea that they don't necessarily just buy software, 
they're buying support. They want someone to call when things go wrong. 
They want a vendor to sue with the fan's spinning with crap. They want 
someone to blame when things go wrong, and someone to come train users 
in classes during inservice.

The majority of public schools in America do not have IT departments 
with resources to accommodate this. Even their computer vendors may balk 
at supporting the computer if the system isn't running the 
vendor-supplied OS in some cases.

> No one uses OpenOffice. Instead, we get to use the worst productivity suite
> ever: MS Office 2008. 

And the most common. We tried moving people here to OO.o and had 
immediate pushback. We heard every reason...it's not what's in the 
business world, it's not what the text teaches in the high school 
computer classes, it's not what others are emailing to them, others 
can't read ODT files. Really it was because it's not what they're 
running at home and just plain didn't want something that looked different.

>I wonder how IT didn't figure this one out yet. 

I'm guessing you're not with the IT department. Your message focuses on 
the computer and what it runs. IT has to manage politics, user goals, 
and their own limited resources.

The savings in cash won't equal the savings in sanity.

>The
> teachers who teach computer classes have to re-learn how to use Office
> because everything's been rearranged because of that stupid ribbon.
> OpenOffice would be a much better idea, so I'll have to see what I can do.

Good luck with that. Honestly.

> 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.

Again, as long as they can do what they need to do, the OS doesn't 
matter unless the users are really stuck on using what they're 
comfortable with from home. For basic stuff Linux gets to be a problem 
when dealing with media...still can't watch the Star Trek trailer from 
Apple on my Ubuntu system. Users spending large amounts of time playing 
flash games and youtube videos as their "must-have" apps will run into 
issues at times. So you're trading one set of common issues for another.

> 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. 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.

Usually with good reason.

Schools preoccupy themselves with latest fads in education, not just IT. 
They have issues from bullying to No Child Left Behind mandates to deal 
with, and somehow a grudge against Windows or OS X isn't high on their 
list of issues to deal with.

> 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. 

So are you saying students can't be trusted to take good care of the 
notebook hardware but you want them to be passionate about something 
like operating systems?

I rarely encounter laptops that "just fall apart." Oddly enough that 
seems to be most teenagers' response to what happened when said item has 
a cosmetic or hardware issue though. It wasn't because they roughly 
handled it that it got scratched or crunched, it just happened, like it 
was notebook suicide.