It’s a great idea and the only thing that makes sense, but if you do that you’ll get an uproar that government is infringing upon private enterprise and distorting the market and all that.

If you aren't completely against ALL government intervention, people might like the fact that teaching Linux is teaching independence.

The people that love private enterprise are the often same people that think small engine repair is an essential life skill, and don't want big tech watching them.

It's not greasy and rumbly and subjectively "real" like the easy-to-market stuff, but it's still a form of self reliance to remove your dependence on a company known for randomly changing stuff whenever they want.

Same with electric cars really. Research into sustainable nonlithium batteries and cheap PV means a possibility for you to never need to buy gas again for the 30 year life of your solar panels if they pull it off.

Then again, some people don't like anything that doesn't feel solid and substantial, and the people most interested in independence might want completely tech free schools. Seems like a lot of people want to go back to paper.

Yeah that's true. However, realistically the uproar will be from lobbyists that will use their skills and money to persuade those people better than I can :(

That sounds like a US only problem to me

So let’s just spend more money on it and create more bureaucracy.

Do you think that maybe the FOSS community isn’t offering consumers what they need?

It's all there, just need to get over the fear of change hurdle. Once schools use it by default, everyone will learn it, and things that aren't like it will become the hurdles.

> Once schools use it by default, everyone will learn it

that's putting the cart before the horse.

Schools, like most non-tech enterprises, have problems to solve that are bigger than the choice of OS on their IT systems. If the end result of switching out of windows is basically the same outcome as having windows (aka, they've replaced some office programs, and other domain specific programs with a linux compatible version), then what is the value proposition _to the school_? The only value proposition of this switch is to society and free software movement in general, which the school doesn't really directly benefit from.

Well if schools are just kid jail, then sure. But if they're a place for raising future generations, then as a benefit to society, it sounds pretty good to me. And all for a, let's face it, trivial amount of effort.

If the school boards change or the gov changes, so will the software makers. Support groups will be plentiful because they all just follow the money. Just like they did for chromeOS, only this time there will be less built-in spyware.

Public schools are kid jail.

>But if they're a place for raising future generations, then as a benefit to society

Anyone who has been to a public school should be well aware they are not a place that breeds greatness. More a place that hammers it down.

It truly is a sad state of affairs, isn't it?

I happen to work with governments (cloud consulting department at BigTech) the expertise definitely isn’t there.

Then it will come with the money. You think those companies that currently offer it for windows will just fold? No. They'll spend a week learning the difference, and claim to have 20 years experience administering Linux or whatever.

You think it only takes a week to transistors an entire large enterprise?

My old company had to use Skype for business for over a year because Teams didn't support phone calls! It was ridiculous. And that's with the so called 'support' Microsoft provided.

They survived.

You haven’t been on either side of a large technical migration. It literally takes years and millions of dollars.

I have been doing just that for years, first at smaller companies and now working with large organizations on the other side at BigTech.

I believe you. I'm sure it's quite a challenge.

>It's all there, just need to get over the fear of change hurdle

How’s accessibility on Linux? I mean considering the situations with even basic things like drag and drop, copy and paste, video chat and screen sharing I don’t have high hopes that “it’s all there”

Some of those things are the same (everyone has Chrome and Firefox), but drag and drop, and copy/paste are functionally superior in, for example, KDE plasma so I'm not sure I know what you're talking about.

I have to use Windows at work. I choose to use Linux at home.

Just use https://www.skolelinux.de/en/

There are endless options. School systems have thousands of employees and administrators; if they can't figure out how to support what are generally wonderfully crafted, complex pieces of software handed to them on a plate, they're not really fit for purpose. We're outsourcing institutional self-sufficiency to Microsoft and Google.

The average enterprise with more than 1000 employees use 150 different SaaS products.

https://explodingtopics.com/blog/saas-statistics

Should they also brings those in house?

The average enterprise also has massive competitive pressures to stay ahead of the curve.

Schools have no such pressures and in fact are better served by being conservative in how quickly they change what they do.

That’s how you get stuck with Lotus as your email system and IE6 in 2022, and frustrating competent admins with old technology.

And how you get mainframes managing their unemployment systems that can’t handle the load when unemployment spikes during a worldwide crises like what happened two years ago.

Yes, governments and public institutions like schools should do that.

You seriously think that every school district should have the expertise to develop software that 150different software companies specialize in?

Bring them in house as in encourage them to release their work on Linux, and if they don't, reimplement whatever thing it is in Linux. Should all be FOSS too if they can manage it. Public money, after all, should have public code.

The idea of re-implementing all those SaaS web apps as Linux apps is completely absurd and doesn’t benefit the end user.

Not all, only those that don't work in Linux for some inexplainable reason and whose developers no longer want government contract money. I think you'll find that that number is basically zero.

So it’s okay to have proprietary software as long as it is running on an open source operating system?

If you want, but why would you want that when there are as good and often better FOSS alternatives. With FOSS stuff you can have your cake and use any kind of plate you want to eat it from.

Is there a “better” alternative to an Office 365 subscription that comes with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, One Drive online storage, hosted email and each user csn use the same set of software between Macs, Windows, Web, Android, iPhones, iPads, etc?

A business can get that at retail for $160/year. A student can buy that for $79.00/4 years.

Those are retail prices. I can guarantee you that large organizations aren’t paying retail.

And don’t overlook the online component and the governance and the SSO. I know plenty of MS shops that use MS’s hosted SSO solution to log in to AWS.

It amazes me how little HN understands about the needs of large enterprises.

Heck I work for one of the Big 5 tech companies (FAANG - Netflix + Microsoft) and it isn’t MS and we all have Microsoft licenses.

What does a student need the MS Office package for in a school context?