Tell HN: My horror story as a student dealing with my University computer lab

No problems at back at my undergrad at Bath Uni either. You could have graduated using just the Uni machines. Plenty of desktops spread around campus, good wifi accessible with a username and password.

I went to UT cs also.

While its not ideal, I thought the cs computer lab was fine. It's not meant to replace your main computer, as a CS major you should probably have your own computer. Its meant more as a place to hang out and work on class projects together and for that I think it does fine.

Also, if you are a cs major you can probably figure out how to 'startx gnome'

Also, for many research groups they have their own computer labs that are not restricted like the main cs lab. I know at least that in the robotics lab they gave out root passwords to their ubuntu machines and you could pretty much do as you like.

Let the students run their own machines?

Considering the difficulty of the entry-level classes (weed out) and the fact that students often have 3-4 extra classes just like it, having them spend hours upon hours of admin work. They're training to be computer scientists not admins.

My school runs RHEL/gnome on some beefy quad-core machines. Whatever is needed for a class is installed immediately and just works. No need to spend hours hunting down packages and installing them, and then no need for the professors/TAs to spend hours upon hours of duplicating configurations in order to make sure that everything can be graded.

Students will acquire enough Unix knowledge throughout their 4 years by using a well-maintained system. Most of them spend about 10-20 hrs/week using it for development -- no need to add another 30 for sysadmin work.

Drexel University had decent labs of every variety: Linux, Mac and Windows. The Linux labs -- used by the computer science and software engineering students -- had reasonably modern single-core machines with 4:3 LCDs approximately 20 inches in size. There was often a shortage of available machines around project deadlines. However, the digital media students, just one floor below us (in the basement), had beefy Windows machines with larger dual monitors and access to powerful render farms! They had plenty of machines to spare, but CS and SE students couldn't even get onto that floor with our key card access. I have no idea who had access to the Mac labs. It certainly wasn't us or the digital media students.

I'm pretty sure the reasoning for this is as follows:

1) Computer science and software engineering students prefer to use their own computers

2) Digital media students can't afford the expensive licenses for the software they need to use (Maya, Max, Photoshop, etc)

3) Typical personal laptops aren't powerful enough to do proper rendering work

4) You can always SSH in, use VIM, and compile from your personal laptop

Back when I went to school (mid-90s), our computer lab was a bunch of orange-screen vt220s connected to a Vax cluster. We didn't have fancy NCSA Mosaic like UT, we had Lynx and gopher. We learned C on a VAX with a broken scanf. Students dropped CS because they couldn't figure out EVE and EDT (visual editors). Our internet connection came through a narrow tenuous pipe from UT Austin. When it went down, I'd do a traceroute and then give "Mordac" over there at UT a hard time.

Oh yeah, there was a PC lab. Running Windows 3.1. That was a place to type your paper. You couldn't do real CS there.

And I had to bike uphill to class both ways in the Texas heat. :)

I think if you can take busted up hand-me-downs and backwards old crap, make it work & explain how to others, and learn how to sidestep a lazy/stubborn/indifferent IT (build your own stuff in ~/local, etc.), you can adapt and do fine anywhere.