Thread: Unix Popularity
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Old 5th July 2008
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phoenix phoenix is offline
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Join Date: May 2008
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Nope. In fact, when we put it into the first elementary school, the grade 6 and 7 classes did English and Computer projects where they developed manuals and tutorials for the younger students. Some classes went so far as to make pamphlets and booklets (using screenshots, digital photos copied from cameras, Scribus for page layout, OpenOffice for text, GIMP and Krita for drawings, etc) that the school sold to other schools. Very, very, very few students complain ... as they now have working computers in the lab, with a helpdesk that the teachers can call when there are issues, and remote help via VNC. Problems are usually fixed while the student is still in the class, instead of waiting a couple weeks for one of the 2 elementary schools techs to get to their school (2 techs for 37 schools).

The students took to it like fish to water. They figured things out right away. It was the staff that had "issues" adapting (especially those who had developed software-version-specific curriculum and assignments, who didn't think it was their job to change/update it to work with OpenOffice or KOffice or whatnot).

My favourite story from that time deals with my sister (she's a penguin fanatic) and her discovering Tux as the Linux mascot. She went nuts over Linux (and Tux in particular). Then she graduated and moved on to grade 8, where everything was Windows XP. After the first week of school, she called to complain about the computers, about how they kept crashing, they never had 30 working computers in the lab, how she kept losing work in MS Office XP, and how boring everything was. And she demanded to know when we'd be bringing Tux into the school! Unfortunately for her, the summer after she graduated from grade 12, we converted her school to Linux. She still hasn't really forgiven me for that. And she still calls every now and then to complain about the college computers (running XP) and how she misses the Linux desktop she had in elementary school. She's very much a Windows user, now, though. I put together a laptop for her, and offered to put Linux on it, but she wanted Windows, as that's what they use at the college, and what's on the home computer.
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