Linux in U.S. Schools: Why the Resistance? (IT Management)

Linux in U.S. Schools: Why the Resistance? (IT Management)

I don't know about the USA. At my local government-run primary school in Australia we trialled Linux in one of the four computing suites. Mixed results.

Software. Enough software exists, which was a large and welcome surprise. Probably due to the move to web applications and Flash. But the software isn't in a finished enough state. TuxPaint lacks the huge richness of KidPix's stamps. AbiWord and OpenOffice lack templates. Clip art sucks. In short, software is not in a good enough state to hold people's attention and motivation.

There's probably enough parts floating around (OpenClipArt springs to mind), but there's not enough work on delivering that with the software (eg, OpenOffice won't work with OpenClipArt's SVG files). And if time-pressed school sysadmin-teachers need to do part assembly, then you've failed anyway.

Support. Lacking. Totally. Not supported by the education department. Not supported by firms which sell into primary education. Linux isn't even supported well by Linux vendors (compare Microsoft's knowledge base documentation on networking to the available documentation for NetworkManager). Searching the GNOME help text for a Windows or MacOS equivalent program nearly always comes up short: surely a cross-reference so that searching for "instant messenger" returned some Pidgin pages wouldn't hurt?

The lack of support from the department is particularly harmful as it erodes one of Linux's major advantages -- its scalability of system administration. A central team could do the routine management of the tens of thousands of computers in a school system, at considerable savings. As it stands, just getting Linux-friendly authentication is painful.

GUI system administration for Linux still doesn't cut it. Configuring stuff from the GUI works. But unlike Windows and MacOS, it is impossible to debug issues from the GUI tools if you don't already know the command line. (For example, "Connection information" in NetworkManager lacks a button to test the reachability of the default router, you've got to know you need the "ping" command, front-ended under "System Tools | Network tools | Ping".)

What we know. There's a two hour window for system support each week. So there's a strong preference for stuff which is known to work.

There are some really good things. The assumption in almost all programs that resources are remote is really useful -- there are still many Windows programs that don't work correctly on a LAN. The single installer is really useful -- trojans could obviously be written for Linux, but they are unlikely to be installed since downloading things through browsers isn't the way Linux software is installed.

My view is that Linux is a viable alternative, and it's well worth running Linux at the backend and in some of the computing facilities in the school. It gives the older primary school students a different experience of computing, and that is welcome in helping older students distinguish essential concepts from implementation details.

If you want to get more Linux into primary schools, then improve the software, especially in doing the last 10% of effort in providing materials and documentation. If you a looking for a killer application, a simple-to-use, network-exploiting presentation authoring tool would be really handy (eg, grabs photos from Flickr, etc).