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Ubuntu Reaches 220,000 PCs in Schools in Spain

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Re: Ubuntu Reaches 220,000 PCs in Schools in Spain

#31

Post by edwinnathaniel »

cs702 wrote: post #5

Migrating to Linux on the desktop -- and Ubuntu in particular -- can make a lot of financial sense for all the national and regional governments, school systems, and other governmental bodies which are currently budget-constrained around the planet. While migration can be costly, painful, and disruptive in the short run, the long-term cost savings appear to be substantial.[1] PS. This is not a new initiative, but a w…

It's hard to know if it makes sense or not without the actual number.

Microsoft gives 90% discounts to EDU...

Re: Ubuntu Reaches 220,000 PCs in Schools in Spain

#33

Post by chrismonsanto »

edwinnathaniel wrote: post #31
cs702 wrote: post #5

Migrating to Linux on the desktop -- and Ubuntu in particular -- can make a lot of financial sense for all the national and regional governments, school systems, and other governmental bodies which are currently budget-constrained around the planet. While migration can be costly, painful, and disruptive in the short run, the long-term cost savings appear to be substantial.[1] PS. This is not a new initiative, but a w…

It's hard to know if it makes sense or not without the actual number. Microsoft gives 90% discounts to EDU...

At my university, pretty much every Microsoft product is available for free through MSDN Academic Alliance. Pretty handy if you want to play around with Visual Studio or if you custom-built a computer that doesn't come with Windows. I don't know if the university has to pay for this or not, but it saves the money of the students at least!

Re: Ubuntu Reaches 220,000 PCs in Schools in Spain

#34

Post by willholloway »

Cost isn't the biggest benefit, the biggest benefit is exposing kids to the operating system (Linux) that runs the majority of servers. Those servers increasingly run our world.

It doesn't matter if the teachers are clueless, some of the curious kids will start messing around with the command line, and a whole new world will open for them.

Re: Ubuntu Reaches 220,000 PCs in Schools in Spain

#35

Post by icebraining »

fmoralesc wrote: post #30
icebraining wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you script google docs? Yes: https://developers.google.com/apps-script/overview By the way, I started programming in '99, and since I didn't have a computer at the time, I learned JavaScript, since I could run it on IE4 on public machines. So yes, a browser (and, I guess, Notepad) is really all you need! Besides, since then and between PHP/Python/etc shared hosting and tools like Codeanywhere (which can talk to S…

> Yes. Neat! I eat my thoughts (It's the kind of thing I miss by using vim for almost everything). EDIT: But it is a separate app...

Not exactly:

"The script editor can be accessed directly at http://script.google.com, or by launching it from one of the Google products which support built-in access to the script editor, such as Google Spreadsheets and Google Sites."

In Spreadsheets, you just need to go to Tools → Scripts → Script Editor.

Re: Ubuntu Reaches 220,000 PCs in Schools in Spain

#36

Post by Jare »

JVIDEL wrote: post #19

Linux always had this "hardcore PC dude" image that made it look like you needed a PhD to use it, but with Ubuntu the fact is 95% of PC users can switch painlessly and even have a better overall experience. The other 5% are those that need certain specific apps that have no real equivalent on Linux, but as more users switch developers will port those apps, just look at Valve. But one problem that is more complex than…

Painlessly? Better experience? Let's see my most recent clean Ubuntu install, from a couple months ago, on a freshly bought HP laptop:

- Terrible WiFi performance. Had to find some other drivers and then edit some file to add some magic names to some sort of blacklist so the drivers I found could actually be used. I have no idea how I even found all this.

- Graphics drivers appear to be software only. Find something called the closed source ATI drivers (Catalyst panel included). After installing, Chrome still refuses to run WebGL, and has all sorts of crazy bugs rendering normal web pages.

- Mouse and keyboard apparently freeze after 20 minutes or so.

- Sleep and hibernate are iffy at best, sometimes after waking up, things will just fail or misbehave. One of the things it tends to do is think the battery is critically low even if it's completely charged, something like it thinks there are two batteries and ones is missing.

- The bluetooth util finds some devices (phones mostly), but ignores my lovely bluetooth mini-mouse. Looking at logs, it seems the Bluetooth driver dies during boot.

- Open text-mode vi from a terminal, move with the arrow keys, and I get strange characters. FFS it's 2012 and THIS crap still happens? (Note: bash works fine)

- When I tell it to shutdown, sometimes it does nothing, sometimes it closes the active window and does nothing else, sometimes it actually shuts down. That's from the menu - closing the lid or hitting the power button behaves different each time.

- ACPI function keys: some work, some don't.

Linux has come a long way from the old days when we installed from floppies and hand-edited clock frequencies to set up a graphics video mode, and if I really need a fully functional Desktop Linux box, I can research the right hardware to buy and the post-install fiddling to make it happen. But let's not kid ourselves about the typical experience awaiting Joe PC User.

Re: Ubuntu Reaches 220,000 PCs in Schools in Spain

#37

Post by wutbrodo »

fmoralesc wrote: post #30
icebraining wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you script google docs? Yes: https://developers.google.com/apps-script/overview By the way, I started programming in '99, and since I didn't have a computer at the time, I learned JavaScript, since I could run it on IE4 on public machines. So yes, a browser (and, I guess, Notepad) is really all you need! Besides, since then and between PHP/Python/etc shared hosting and tools like Codeanywhere (which can talk to S…

> Yes. Neat! I eat my thoughts (It's the kind of thing I miss by using vim for almost everything). EDIT: But it is a separate app...

Not a separate app, in any meaningful sense of the word. I use it extensively for personal use; I have a couple spreadsheets online involving personal data and I just click a button in the menu for spreadsheets to open up the script editor.

Re: Ubuntu Reaches 220,000 PCs in Schools in Spain

#38

Post by devcpp »

Jare wrote: post #36
JVIDEL wrote: post #19

Linux always had this "hardcore PC dude" image that made it look like you needed a PhD to use it, but with Ubuntu the fact is 95% of PC users can switch painlessly and even have a better overall experience. The other 5% are those that need certain specific apps that have no real equivalent on Linux, but as more users switch developers will port those apps, just look at Valve. But one problem that is more complex than…

Painlessly? Better experience? Let's see my most recent clean Ubuntu install, from a couple months ago, on a freshly bought HP laptop: - Terrible WiFi performance. Had to find some other drivers and then edit some file to add some magic names to some sort of blacklist so the drivers I found could actually be used. I have no idea how I even found all this. - Graphics drivers appear to be software only. Find something…

My entire beginning programming class had to install Ubuntu and no one even complained about it, with all the various computers in the homes of 60 novice students. Some installed it on their laptops, no connectivity problem. We did a lot of stuff on it, including surfing, coding and watching movies. No software issues whatsoever.

Look, sometimes people have a lot of issues with Windows too. No OS is perfect. But those are not very common instances. I think you are just not lucky.

Re: Ubuntu Reaches 220,000 PCs in Schools in Spain

#39

Post by oliwarner »

calinet6 wrote: post #11
oliwarner wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they don't need anything but a browser these days Sure, assuming you only want the next generation of young adults to be able to look things up on Google and use Facebook. When my school tried to teach me how to use MS Word (I was 13) I laughed. I already knew everything there was to know about it. Of course none of this was innate, nor did I know it just because I was young. Eight years earlier when I was having m…

Ahem. Google Docs? MS Office Web Apps? Etc? There's quite literally an app or site for almost everything on the internet. It's great that you think your curiosity and drive for knowledge is somehow unique in this world, but I suspect you're wrong and just have a damn-kids-get-off-my-lawn mentality. The web has only made knowledge and possibility more accessible, not less, and it's naïve to think that it's a dumbed-do…

Oh please. Google's word processor is barely half the application compared to what I was playing with 15-20 years ago. A proper desktop word processor is a lot more than shoving words on a page.

Okay, perhaps that is my "damn-kids" mentality but design and interface metaphor have totally kicked function's ass in the past five years. You don't have to look far to see some major examples of that (Win8, Gnome, anything on a tablet/phone). The applications I'm talking about can only be consider equivalent to a point.

So yeah. In terms of productivity (and useful life skills) the software I grew up with is better than what a kid with a tablet has today.

I also used to really love browsing Encarta 95. I do look up a ton of stuff on Wikipedia these days but I rarely go there without direction.

Re: Ubuntu Reaches 220,000 PCs in Schools in Spain

#40

Post by calinet6 »

fmoralesc wrote: post #28
calinet6 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahem. Google Docs? MS Office Web Apps? Etc? There's quite literally an app or site for almost everything on the internet. It's great that you think your curiosity and drive for knowledge is somehow unique in this world, but I suspect you're wrong and just have a damn-kids-get-off-my-lawn mentality. The web has only made knowledge and possibility more accessible, not less, and it's naïve to think that it's a dumbed-do…

Can you script google docs? That's how I "played with my word processor" when I was a kid (I was a bookish kid and read every manual in my computer; turns out many were about VB scripting and the Windows API... I was intrigued ). I suspect many more did. If people had access only to web apps, they couldn't have those kind of experiences; I think that's what the parent commenter points to. Now, I don't actually think…

If you haven't noticed, you can script the entire web. It's the most "scriptable" platform yet, and it's way more fun and open and flexible to play with than any of the older APIs.

If you're the kind of person who looks under the hood, you're going to do it regardless of whether you're working on a desktop word processor or a web app, and it is my strong opinion that these kinds of intelligent and curios people are still coming into this world.

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