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Most Useful OS For High-School Science Education?
Clayperion writes "I teach at a high school program for gifted students which emphasizes math, science, and technology. Currently we have two computer labs for the students: A new programming lab (all Dell PCs running XP, MS Visual C++, Eclipse, and SolidWorks for programming and CAD) and an old general-purpose lab (all Macs running OS X 10.3, with software ranging from some legacy OS 9 science applications to MathCad). Most of our students eventually pursue graduate degrees in science and engineering, and we would like them to have experience with the tools they will find out in industry. As we look to replace the old machines, there has been a push to switch to PCs with XP so that there is only a single platform to support. There are over 5000 machines on the district's network and the IT department is very small (fewer than 10 people), so the fewer hardware and software differences between the machines, the better. Without opening a flame war as to which one is 'better,' I'd like to know what those of you in the science and engineering fields actually use more in your labs (hardware, OS, software), so that we can decide which platform to support. It will most likely have to be either XP or OS 10.6, with very restricted permissions to students and teachers, as that is the comfort level of IT and administration, but I'll push for whatever would benefit the students the most."
I see a lot of "Use linux, its the way to go" type responses. However, you're going to lock down the systems a bunch anyway - its a school. If they're programming, big freaking deal, they can always use cygwin, they aren't going to be doing kernel hacking or something on school computers unless if its in a virtual machine type setup. What do your tools which your users are already comfortable run on? Windows? Then run windows - theres no reason to screw people over with a switch unless if it will improve something. Students will have to learn different interfaces anyway at some point, so its not going to kill them - they may as well get some concepts down beforehand rather than presenting some specifics. If you want to teach them about linux, you can always setup virtual machines or ssh into some boxes setup for this purpose explicitly. The users are probably comfortable for the most part in windows as it is, and frankly, they're probably going to be sitting around in gnome or kde on linux anyway, which really, theres about a 15 minute transition time tops, aside from keyboard shortcuts which, really arent important.
Editors like vi(m) & emacs clones run on windows, so thats not a big issue either. And most of the software has alternatives anyway that can coexist with the ones you're using right now, i.e. visual studio and eclipse for some cases, scilab and matlab (though matlab is far preferred in my experience), etc.
And what about solidworks? doesn't run on mac os x natively. gotta bootcamp/parallels it.
These kids are probably going to college anyway where they'll see more appropriate tools of the trade anyway. Their coursework shouldnt really be about the OS they're using, but what they can do cross OS. ie. even if you're on a windows machine, you can teach them shell scripting through cygwin, and the concepts will carry over to windows powershell or with some simplifications to cmd. Or, you can teach them how to code in C++ using visual studio as an ide, do a lesson on makefiles and they can move to g++ when they want - its more important that they know good C++ though (i guess people are using java here now though).
they'll eventually be dropped in an unfamiliar environment anyway... may as well teach things that are more general than what OS they're using specifically. And a lot of things can be done that make sense cross OS anyway thanks to virtualization and things like cygwin. And you don't really want to make students unhappy by switching them off something they're pretty comfortable with already for no good reason - you have wonders like X forwarding and what not which can help.
From my experience, companies like Dell have better support for large deployments than Apple (and more modern experience with this sort of thing). So the hardware would dictate windows (or linux, but im against that unless if its virtualized or dual booted). You can get all 3 with mac mini's or other mac hardware, but a recent OS shouldnt make too much of a difference in a high school setting (ie. win xp, vista, 7, a recent fedora/ubuntu/centos/slackware/etc., os x 10.3 or above, etc.).