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Today i found following article, sharing experiences with a Linux-desktop at Westcliff High School for Girls Academy, UK.
Nice to read, how teachers and students experience "life without Windows".
For all those having lots of time, now in many places holidays have started:
http://news.kde.org/2013/07/04/year-linux-desktop

That's rather an interresting read. Most people trying to make a trancision to Linux typically only focuses on the "money-side" of it. It's refreshing to see that in this case it has been a co-effort of both the staff and the students to find the best solution.
In the end the school is saving costs as well, due to not having to upgrade hardware and software, but that's only a positive side effect as I see it.

About time a UK school tried this, I used to get annoyed at my daughters school for sending homework home for her that required MS(take your pick of office app) to do it,
They didn't like the phone call about when are they sending a key and disc with it on + a win license/disk as so she can do it!

Pointed to the fact that not every child has net access or MS windows/office so can the please use the open standards as my daughter used OpenOffice at the time.

Believe it or not they did from then on and they also use OpenOffice in the school along side MS office and state that if a student doesn't have MS office to download OpenOffice/libreoffice. .
Which is handy as my son now attends that school.

But with regards the cost to the schools is unbelievable to me , lets face it photo-shop and what not ain't cheap Yes i know that they get educational discount but with 100+ comps that's still going to add up.


Pete.

Sadly, in my country most companies back away from Linux and open source in general because "there is no company backing it, it must be bad if no company is behind it." and "if we run into trouble, who will help us? The community? No thanks, most information about that stuff is in English, yikes!"

M_R wrote:Sadly, in my country most companies back away from Linux and open source in general because "there is no company backing it, it must be bad if no company is behind it." and "if we run into trouble, who will help us? The community? No thanks, most information about that stuff is in English, yikes!"

Plenty of corporate support for Linux. Mandriva was one such. Beyond that, there is Redhat (RHEL, Fedora), Oracle (SUSE, OpenSUSE), and Canonical (Ubuntu). I'm quite sure there are others, but these are the ones that pop to mind. IBM provides a LOT of support and backing for Linux. Of course, Google does also (Android, Chrome).

There are lots of small companies supporting Linux as well. I am part owner (and partner) in one such.

isadora wrote:Today i found following article, sharing experiences with a Linux-desktop at Westcliff High School for Girls Academy, UK.
Nice to read, how teachers and students experience "life without Windows".
For all those having lots of time, now in many places holidays have started:
http://news.kde.org/2013/07/04/year-linux-desktop

Wow, what a fantastic story. Makes me happy to read
Hopefully this can also get students into programming at a much earlier time, as GNU/Linux in general by default is much friendlier for that.

It is interesting for them that now they can choose to move to new hardware whenever they want instead of having a very short Windows cycle. That will surely save them a lot of money and gain them a lot of freedom. Also a lot of savings from Microsoft Office, although personally I think LibreOffice could get better. Additionally it was interesting that some people didn't like the move to Linux, but that was also so with Windows 7, and in particular interesting that "nobody liked Windows 8". Hehe.

As far as I understood, the home enviroment is stored on the server, so each student have their own personal desktop regardless of which machine they use. That sounds like a very good practice.

Very good stuff!

M_R wrote:Sadly, in my country most companies back away from Linux and open source in general because "there is no company backing it, it must be bad if no company is behind it." and "if we run into trouble, who will help us? The community? No thanks, most information about that stuff is in English, yikes!"

I think this article also shows that with the savings an institution can make from not constantly switching hardware and the licence of Microsoft Windows and office, they can hire an IT staff to administer the computers and network.