Problem is, after three months of work, I wasn't able to reliably deploy the OS to a room of computers and connect it to the school network - even though I worked as a Linux server admin before that. Every single computer (all the same, with serial number one after the other) had a different set of issues that made it completely unusable. Many of ones I got kinda working got broken after a few rounds of updates.
Windows just worked right after installation. The year of Linux desktop is still not there.
Those machines ran without fault for multiple years until I had to add some additional support for caching the NFS mounts because we had added so many clients after the initial installation that we were overloading our NAS.
No hardware errors for sure. But these were desktops (not of uniform origin).
Windows machines on the other hand were a bit more painful, every single one had to be hand enrolled to the sambav4 “AD” (we didn’t have AD) and the instructions never worked the same way twice.
So annoying.
Yeah I can imagine that not having AD makes things more complicated, but once you have it, it works very well on Windows.
Not being able to reliably connect to AD was one of the failures I had with this classroom.
Especially because that Microsoft product (AD) is usually the hardest thing to integrate with from other operating systems; and is contingent on owning all user accounts (and usually means you have to use their email systems and file sharing systems).
Quite a lot of lock-in for a base level of user experience.
But I guess that’s OK if you are a shareholder. :)
I definitely wouldn't discount the amount of effort that Apple has put into that.
Try doing it with linux or with OSX Mountain Lion.
The thing is, people (admin and users) are quite happy with the MS stuff - it's not perfect and costs a lot, but it mostly works without too much setup work.
Nah. I’ll pass.
I detest ecosystem lock-in like this. :)
Especially from foreign entities.
This is simply false. A lot of fields use specialized software that is only available on Windows and sometimes macOS. For instance, my wife works in neurolinguistics where most standard software for doing things like analyzing EEGs is for Windows.
However, I agree that this may be true in other branches of education. E.g. in our daughter's primary school they use Chromebooks. They are used as glorified 'web terminals'. I can see why a mutable Linux distribution would be awful from a maintenance perspective, but an immutable Linux system like Fedora Silverblue would probably work as well as ChromeOS.
This is also a failing of the Dutch government and the EU, leaving things to the market, rather than taking initiative and making a standardized education platform.