Perception of Linux Among IT Undergrads

iconian writes: "The Linux Journal has a story on IT students and their perception of Linux. One of the funnier myths perceived to be true is that 'Microsoft's technical support is the best in the industry and is superior to that offered by the Linux community.' It just goes to show how little real world experience students have. It's a bit disturbing considering they will be the next generation of technology workers."

Comments

Re:Ask the kids, not the working stiffs

[de_boer_man]

I completely disagree.

I have been teaching classes at a local college for six years and my experience has been completely different. A majority of the students in my evening and weekend classes are "working stiffs," but many of these "working stiffs" are working in CS fields and are more knowledgable than the whiny brats in my daytime classes that are attending school and are funded by the "Bank of Daddy."

Age doesn't necessarily determine whether or not someone understands and uses *nix or the "other operating systems." The "working stiffs" in my evening and weekend classes tended to have more practical experience in computer science, including more exposure to a wider variety of operating systems, than their daytime counterparts.

When I teach evening classes, I am used to people being able to follow along when I use Vim and Cygwin so that I can feel at home and productive in the school-mandated MS OS. My first daytime class was an eye opener! I spent WAY too much time explaining that ls is the same as dir (except better), that less is type (but with functionality), etc. At first, the blank stare "deer-in-the-headlights" looks that I got when I didn't explain such things surprised me. Then I realized that a majority of my day students seemed to care more about their grade than about the quality of the education they were receiving.

Yes, there are generalizations in what I have typed, but after my second daytime class, I vowed never to teach another class between 8am and 5pm.

Re:MS VS. Linux techsupport

[JabberWokky]

Basically, in the past when Ive had a NT/2000 or MSSQL issues I've paid my $200 bucks and got it worked out... everytime. Its not free or fun, but generally MS's paid corporate support is actually quite efficient.

Show me a student with $200 to fork over for support. On the other hand, show me a student who could use learning about databases by setting one up. I have SAP, Sybase, Oracle and MySQL discs lying around that I got for free by writing to the companies. They aren't all licensed for commercial use, but they all have kickass support - and the Open Source one has some of the best, for free, pay by incident and contract.

If you're not talking "support for a student" level stuff, I've had eight Oracle consultants under my department farting away time in the cubicles we provided as they played the blame game with IBM over an Oracle on AIX installation... for nearly three weeks. In retrospect, walking in and wiping all partitions and telling them to rebuild the damn installation would have been quicker and cheaper. When I needed support from TCX, I had bought a year of support, ran into a problem with a persistant connect through a firewall. I gave them an account on my system, went home, came back the next day, and *they* had called the firewall company, gotten support, and had provided precise step by step instructions to fix the problem... on the firewall. They knew it wasn't their problem - but they got it working.

You're the one who brought up Databases, so I figured I'd reply in that vein. As for Linux itself, I've *never* run into a problem that a little Google or mailing list archive searching didn't resolve quickly.

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Evan