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

[David McNally]

Hi again.

I'm just going to reply quickly, but I still want to take into account all
of the ideas and points that have been put into this. I also want to let
everyone know that, just after sending the first message about this, I was
told that I might have more success on the edubuntu-users list. I didn't.
But there still have been some people sending in messages there.

(I'd also like to point out a slightly stupid mistake that I recently made.
In the third paragraph of my second email in this topic, I typed out the
phrase "typographicalr errors", when I should not have put in the 'r' at the
end of the word "typographical". I actually made a typographical error when
I typed out "typographical errors". It was a total accident, I swear, but
I'm sorry about it. It's really not such a big deal, though.)

Clifford Ilkay said that I live a sheltered life because I go to a school
where we only use Macintosh. I do not live a sheltered life. I simply go to
only one school. In my experience, it is unusual for a student at a public
school to attend more than one different school at a time. The fact that I
spend very little time during the day anywhere but school and home does not
infer that I live a sheltered life. I live a life that is normal for people
of my age and geographical location on the earth.

Clifford also told us about a discussion that his brother heard on the
subway between two teenagers. If you haven't read it, please do so. That's
not the way most people act, especially teens who have used Apple's machines
since they were kindergarteners, like myself and my fellow classmates. I'd
also like to point out that I am not insisting that we use Ubuntu (or
Edubuntu), rather than OS X. I still like using OS X, which still beats out
Windows at nearly everything. And Apple is, by far, one of the most
innovative companies in the world, especially in computers. I'm just
wondering whether Ubuntu (or Edubuntu) is better than OS X in an educational
environment. I've used both, and I, personally, think that Ubuntu (or
Edubuntu) beats OS X, but not by much, and I didn't have to set up a server
for either of them when I tried them, so I don't know how much that
contributes to the decision and this conversation. Apple is very good at the
TCO arguement, and, although their computing products still force you to pay
more at once, they are still cheaper in the end. The fact that they charge
you for the entire thing at once is the reason that they don't sell as much
as Microsoft.

I agree with what Paige Thompson said. I like the analogy that you made with
GM and the SUVs.

Christopher J Combrink pointed out that Macs are becoming big in South
Africa. That's interesting; I didn't know that. Macs are still very
powerful, but still user-friendly - a line that Apple has managed to hit
right-on for many years.

There's no reason that very small children can't use Ubuntu. Have you seen
three-year-olds using computers before? They use it as though they built it
themselves! There's not reason to say that it would be difficult to use for
a young child.

An important thing, I think, about Ubuntu, is that it isn't that similar to
Windows or OS X. Too many people who use Windows find it unusual to see a
computer with the equivalent of the Start Menu at the top of the screen, and
in three different menus, which is the norm in operating systems running
GNOME.

Bart Silverstrim said that we need to write textbooks for using OO.o
Impress, which made me wonder something: why don't schools appreciate tools
like Wikiversity and Wikibooks, which are almost like open-source virtual
textbooks themselves. I know that many schools don't treat Wikipedia with
the respect that many - including myself - think it deserves, but my school
has become very impressed with Wikipedia over the past few years, and allows
students to use it for research. Wikipedia is a good analogy to open-source
software like Ubuntu, Firefox, and OO.o, because it is open-source.
Wikipedia is actually licensed under the GNU General Public License (it says
so at the bottom of every page).

Also, is OpenOffice really completely compatible with MS Office, including
with the .docx file format that Microsoft put in to try to stop OO.o from
becoming more popular?

This thread has gotten so long that it is difficult to respond to what
everyone has said in order, because I always get so lost, but I think that
it's more of a good thing than a bad thing. Please keep responding to what
everyone else has to say!

Thanks,

David McNally

On Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 7:12 PM, David McNally <david3333333 at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hello everybody.
>
> This question will probably take a little while to type, but I'll try to
> get it through.
>
> First off, I should probably point out that I live here in the United
> States, in northern New Jersey. The kind of people who live around me are
> rich idiots; they're the kind of people who, somehow, have a lot of money,
> but still use Windows. No one here knows anything about Linux, let alone
> Ubuntu.
>
> I use three different Operating Systems every day: Ubuntu at home, OS X at
> school, and Windows everywhere else (mostly friends' houses). It's
> confusing, but I'm pretty good with all three of them. Obviously, Windows is
> still the worst of the three, and I try to avoid it as often as possible,
> but that's not too hard. However, I'm completely stuck with OS X at school.
> I actually have classes where we sit in front of Macs and learn to use
> Microsoft Office 2008. Which means I'm stuck using that stupid ribbon that
> those Microsoft imbiciles put into Office 2008. We also browse the web with
> Safari, the crummy web browser that Apple put into OS X.
>
> Then I go home to Ubuntu and everything's just perfect.
>
> I'm not saying that OS X is terrible; it's actually pretty good. But time
> after time, the teachers and students are confused with one program after
> another not loading or freezing or something. The IT people, in my opinion,
> have the hardest job in the entire building. They have to make OS X Server
> work with 500-some-odd computers with OS X (which is harder than it sounds),
> and install Office 2008 on every computer, and if anything stops working,
> they're the ones who have to fix it. And, needless to say, there are many
> other programs that they use.
>
> I'm thinking: what if we could just say good-bye to all of this and just
> switch to Ubuntu or Edubuntu. It would be hard, especially because the
> school has been on Macintosh since the early 90's, but that doesn't mean it
> wouldn't be impossible. Everyone was able to switch from OS 9 to OS X
> without too much hassle. I know that the Ubuntu/Edubuntu servers work pretty
> well, so they could replace OS X Server with that, and replace OS X itself
> with Ubuntu/Edubuntu. I know that you can run other OSes on iMacs, so we
> could do that, and we could replace Safari with Firefox, and replace MS
> Office 2008 with OpenOffice.org. (One of my classes is "Computer
> Applications" which is really just learning to use Word, Excel, PowerPoint,
> etc, but my teacher is so used to using the older versions, which were
> always almost exactly that same, version-to-version, so she is completely
> confused with the ribbon and all of the other changes. I know that OO.o will
> probably never put in the ribbon.)
>
> But I'm still the only person that I know that uses Linux. I'm on my little
> Linux island, surrounded by Windows and OS X. Many of my teachers don't even
> know what Linux is, let alone Ubuntu or Edubuntu. The school has spent
> hundreds of thousands of dollars (yes, I did all of the math) on software
> alone; for reasons I don't understand, the school always has to have the
> most recent version of everything, especially OS X and MS Office.
>
> Still, I don't see any reason that it wouldn't work. Everyone would be
> using OO.o, so it would be just like older versions of MS Office, and the
> computers would never get viruses, and I know that there are many
> open-source Linux programs for helping teachers. It couldn't be done
> overnight, but they could do it over the summer vacation (or maybe even the
> Christmas vacation). For the few programs that we use where there is no
> Linux alternative (by the same company or an open-source clone), we would
> have to use Wine or something like it. I'm not sure what the other
> alternatives are, but we could find out.
>
> Would we be able to do this at all? Also: is Edubuntu really that much
> better for schools than Ubuntu?
>
> Please let me know what you think.
>
> Thanks,
>
> David McNally
>
> --
> David McNally
> david3333333 at gmail.com
> apt-get moo
>



-- 
David McNally
david3333333 at gmail.com
apt-get moo
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-users/attachments/20081120/c8f7fc93/attachment.html>