Linux

Great job! Now it's a good time to learn a bit of Ansible so you can keep your fleet up-to-date and configured. It would also come in handy in case you get a permit to do more conversions in the future.

Linux has been ready for some time within various educational programs, but maybe you are referring to relatively early education curriculum in public schools? The general anecdotes I've heard from teachers within a variety of grade levels in the USA (mostly elementary and high school levels, but some doctoral engineering/scientific as well) convey that the largest hurdles to overcome are:

1. Teaching the teachers. Teachers are usually very smart and capable, but are often chronically overworked, overstressed, and underpaid for their labor. They have limited mental bandwidth in learning new tech workflows while having the added obligation of teaching these workflows to students which may be at an attention/interest deficit.
2. Challenging the status quo at the administrative level. Schools often receive incentives, grants, steep discounts, etc, for installing certain types of hardware or software packages. The software baselines of some schools are restricted at the district level; many public libraries are restricted by the city/county. Perhaps the best approach here is to install Linux as a "secondary" option (similar to how a smaller number of e.g. Macs may be installed in a computer lab comprised mostly of Windows computers) until it's more widely adopted.
3. Advocating for equivalent Linux support for popular proprietary software. This is especially true for the creative design community, such as graphic design and professional music production. Adobe is usually the target of criticism here; Linux does not currently hold enough market share to capture Adobe's attention while their patrons usually have unwavering brand loyalty or are unwilling to make any tooling/workflow compromises as to maintain their livelihood.
4. FOSS-friendly awareness campaigns. Showing people that they can remain productive while not being at the mercy of Big Tech. Not using public funds for private industry.
5. Feature parity case studies compared to proprietary options.
6. Overcoming the stereotype that Linux is only for techy people, shrouded by gatekeepers, or subject to drama/infighting.

Bill Gates is responsible for Common Core which has enshitified the education systems of many states. Anything the schools do to stop giving money to Microsoft is a good move.

Linux is so good today. Windows is increasingly shooting itself in the foot and MacOS requires a huge premium (and also billionaires suck) which is increasingly incompatible with budget conscious sectors like education. Really great stuff if you're managing to get people to love it there.

Next month: The principal complains that the students play SuperTuxKart now. :)

Well done! Protip: You can use double new lines to format paragraphs. And full-stops.

Linux has been ready for education for a long time! Most of the public high school machines I interacted with in the mid 2000s were linux based. There was a dedicated Mac lab for creative work.

Little side note

those computers in question had either i5-4750 (I think?) or i7-4970 so running windows 10 with all its bloat was not going to be an easy task

The i7-4790K is still quite powerful, so I'm pretty sure this wasn't the problem, at all. Perhaps they're running on an HDD, have little RAM, or you got the CPU wrong.

You can see the CPU and RAM by launching System Info from tbf start menu, and see if it's running on an SSD or HDD by launching Disks from the menu.

Using Linux in the university back in 2004 helped make the jump to Linux at home and I have been using it for 20 years now.

It takes one technology inclined person to set it up, it's just takes another one to find a workaround, now the success of Linux in preventing gamers from doing their think depends on whether the second person decides to make the workaround known

I wouldn't be shocked if more schools start looking for open source options as their funding gets cut by the current regime.

Beautiful work .... I wish my school had done that when I was a kid.

The great thing about it is that now you are helping to generate a new crop of kids who will learn how to use Linux. Sure, they will try to do stupid things on it like install games or figure out how to bypass things or install or uninstall ... the great thing about that is that they will learn how to use the system in order to try to break it. It's the same way I learned how to use Linux and probably the same way you learned how to use it.

You've advanced the computer department for those kids more than you know.

This is great for a handful of devices but I deploy and administrate hundreds of devices at my school. As much as I would love to, there's no way I could sell this without a really robust way of managing device policies & software deployment. I understand RHEL has something like that but that it isn't quite up to the same standard as the Microsoft admin ecosystem just yet.

That's an awesome story. If all your doing is browsing the Web or using applications that can easily and stably run on linux or have drop in replacements then linux would definitely be totally viable. On the other hand if you need to install specific proprietary applications and you have to rely on wine then maybe not.

Focus on lessons instead of slacking, eh?

workstation013 is not in the sudoers file. 
This incident will be reported.

Minecraft Java Edition runs natively in Linux. But kids these days are probably playing Bedrock... chumps.

Don't forget to test updates and make timeshift backups when needed, I never had a bad update but it really helps.

Btw I would recommend leaving a note on the desktop saying something like COMPUTER_SPECS.TXT. I had Linux on my computers in school, and I was thinking "holy crap Linux is slow and old", but it turned out to be cheap hardware (and I didn't know better, back then)

That’s super awesome

Buuuut my guest gaming machine is a 4670k machine and I can confirm that not only does Windows 10 run very smoothly on it, but it also runs most modern games at 60+FPS! CPU-bound games can struggle. We finally got my partner a new computer and made that one the guest machine when Persona 5 went from 80FPS down to 5FPS when they got off the train hahaha

Lol a kid can google how to install games on linux, just need one to do it and teach the others, I used to bring games on a usb to play on macs through wine through the school lan, eventually I put them in some random folder on the school network, it didnt delete it til like the last day of school my senior year, wed copy the games to our computers and delete them at the end of class.

Liberation

You have turned Roblox/Minecraft loving little kids into a lifelong Linux haters. 🤣

I applaud you.

PS: So how are the computers performing now?