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A Year of Linux Desktop At Westcliff High School
jrepin writes "Around a year ago, a school in the southeast of England, Westcliff High School for Girls Academy (WHSG), began switching its student-facing computers to Linux, with KDE providing the desktop software. The school's Network Manager, Malcolm Moore, contacted us at the time. Now, a year on, he got in touch again to let us know how he and the students find life in a world without Windows."
And they didn't even meet much resistance: "Younger students accept it as normal. Older students can be a little less flexible. There are still a few that are of the view that I can get rid of Microsoft Word when I can pry it from them. Staff are the same (although it is surprisingly not age-related). Some are OK and some hate it. Having said that, an equal number hate Windows 7 and nobody liked Windows 8. I think the basic problem is that Windows XP is a victim of its own success. It works fairly well from a user point of view, it's been around practically forever, and people don't like change, even some students, oddly."
Nobody said this was a focus group.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I'd really like to see a desktop suite of alternatives which do away w/ the shackles of backwards compatibility and instead try to do things right:
- LyX for documents
- Flexisheet for spreadsheets
Wish there was something other than Asymptote or METAPOST to suggest for vector graphics (I'd like to see a successor to Altsys Virtuoso and Aldus IntelliDraw and FutureWave SmartSketch).
Other alternatives which aren't ``just'' clones?
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Is there any reason to think this user base would be any more or less likely to adapt to Linux than a "normal user base"?
> [Windows XP] works fairly well from a user point of view, it's
> been around practically forever, and people don't like change.
Yes, yes, and yes. Too bad MS didn't realize that -- they could have just spent the last few years refining XP and keeping people happy.
Apple actually has a pretty good thing going on with OS X -- like them or not, "small changes every year or two" beats "monumental fuckups twice a decade."
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
One of the reasons we see so much Windows in education is that its cheaper than Linux. Microsoft gives out free software and hardware deals to schools as "donations". At my University, our CSE department had clearly been supplied with a lot of Windows stuff (I got 3 free Windows licences, and lots of other stuff as a student, I suspect the Labs got similar offers). The ratio of Windows to Linux machines was higher than most of the students wanted (It was often hard to find open Linux machines).
My High-school got all its computers replaced through some deal with Microsoft while I was there, and they were all Windows.
Microsoft makes large investments in getting its products into education so people get used to them. The people who resist change will then be stuck with them and but it in the future.
I assume this kind of thing is not the case everywhere, but their efforts seems to be keeping Windows as the standard OS in education. I'm really happy to see people working (and succeeding) at escaping this.
I have to wonder about the Microsoft corporate strategy to keep changing the interfaces to their OS with each release.
Imagine if all changes were on the back end (security, improved networking, etc) and only a handful of changes were made with the front end. Windows would have millions of content and loyal users. And nobody would ever want to change.
The author mentioned that some parents protested because they felt learning Microsoft Office is crucial to their children's success. However we now live in an era where Microsoft is beginning to lose that stronghold. With Open/Libre Office always improving and solutions such as Google Apps gaining traction, I fail to see how this is really a factor anymore. By 2024 MS may not even be the major player anymore in the office space. This is like the prior generation telling us we must be proficient at using a typewriter or hand writing in cursive to land a job.
To be fair, the difference between XP and Vista/7 wasn't that drastic. Sure the colors changed but if anything, it was still XP underneath with an updated look (and some cool new tools). Windows 8 is where they went off on a tangent and put a little too much tablet UI in a desktop OS.
They said the same about DOS and Wordperfect when i was in highschool, where are they now?
School should teach users generally applicable concepts, ie that there are multiple applications to accomplish a given task. If you only teach specific software then users will be stuck if they encounter different software, and by the time they leave school the software will be different. Even newer versions of the same applications are often wildly different. If taught properly, people will be able to grasp any new application that's designed for performing the same general functions.
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If Ballmer is able and willing to pull the plug on both win XP AND windows 7, in favour of windows 8, it will be easy to predict a booming interest in Linux on the desktop.
"If a boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, give him loyalty." (John Boyd, 1927-1997)
Exactly! Because we all know that school is first and foremost a job training program designed to replicate drone workers efficiently. You wouldn't want to expose those impressionable youngsters to alternative tech, or heaven forbid, non-PC thought.
I used a typewriter in high school.
on the side, a teacher and some of us students formed a computer club and bought a TRS-80 so we could do Z80 assembly.
Since then I've used various document creating softwares on CDC Cyber, Vax, Unix, OS/2, Novell, Windows, Linux,
so the answer to your question is "hell no, what's the point"
to be fair, we'd also have to consider DOS -> Windows 3.11 -> windows 95/98 -> (junk no one bought) -> Windows 2000 -> XP which were pretty drastic
Um, I think he was talking about "loyal" users... not simply users or defaults.
There is a Universal Life Value Check it
Figure out this: Loading very large documents, which are fairly common in professional settings, is instanteous with Word because it loads them asynchronously and doesn't parse the entire document when it is loaded, LibreOffice and its predecessor on the other hand try to parse the entire document, which can take upward to seveal minutes. It is them that need to change some of the architecture of their program, not the users who "must adapt to change".
If you can't figure out LIbre Office you shouldn't have your job.
LibreOffice just isn't very good. I've used StarOffice, then OpenOffice, then LibreOffice. I haven't used Microsoft Word since Word 97. And I still think LibreOffice sucks. It's usable, but amateurish.
Open source just can't get user interfaces right. LibreOffice has subtle problems, such as spelling correction that insists on making a change even after you've undone the change. Microsoft Word will yield to the user in that situation. The command-line crowd will never get fine details like that. I have Windows 7 and Ubuntu machines side by side on my desk, but the Ubuntu machine is used only for robotics software development.
I've watched Linux blow it on the desktop for fifteen years. There was an opportunity when XP was late. Linux blew it. There was an opportunity when everybody hated Vista. Linux blew it. There's an opportunity now when nobody wants to go to Windows 8. Linux is blowing it.
For a good laugh, look at what it takes to create a shortcut to a program in Ubuntu.
It's OK to upgrade it with drivers for newer hardware, and plug up more security holes. But give us the same user interface (as a choice).
Really. We CAN go back and run most older window systems/managers on a new Linux kernel and maybe new X server. We can get the old user interface. We can even get something that emulates Windows 95 (seen it). Why can't the core Microsoft Windows system do that? Just provide an app that chooses which user interface to use.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Easy to say discard compatibility; except that means EVERYTHING has to become compatible with this NEW system. All you're doing is trading one compatibility for another. Plus people already have older PCs with an installed ecosystem of programs.
None of my workplaces have used Windows for anything important. The shift to everything-as-a-web-app certainly helps.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
All one needs is a reasonable set of import / export tools.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
My last workplace used Linux almost exclusively. Its not a Windows World out there.
Personally, I think learning only one OS cripples someone's understanding of is a design decision in an OS, what is a fact about current computers, and what is basic reality. Its much like learning only one programming language, or only one spoken language: you can't understand something very well from passive use of a single just one type. This is why you pretty much have to take some foreign language to get into college, and the same thing applies to OSs.
There is a reason I've played with Windows, Mac (os 1-9 and X), Linux (Ubuntu, Fedora, Sugar...), BSD, Plan9 etc. and read up on others like DOS, Genode, Unix, Multix etc. I don't expect everyone to go that far, but using at least a few will greatly help you understand what an OS is, and what they can do.
I've see single OS users (my mom with Mac for example) attempt to explain how to do something on a different OS (say windows) to someone by referring to specific specific abstraction's details (where menus are for example) which are missing or very different on the OS they are talking about. Not understanding the difference between "launching a web browser", and "clicking on safari in the right end of the dock" is horrible! People won't make it past this naive understanding unless you either make them use a couple OSs, or give them a serious lesson in OS design (I recommend the first approach).
Windows or Linux fanboi, both agree Win8 set us up the bomb.
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Really? I plugged a headphone into the headphone jack yesterday and some dialog box popped up asking me if I wanted to use headphones. That never happened before Windows 7.
It's ok. Linux is winning the long game because the importance of the desktop and desktop applications is diminishing.
All of the most popular things to do with computers. (Twitface, mytubes, yougram, whatever) are all just as easy to use on linux as they are windows. Or macintosh. Or a tablet. Or a smartphone.
Microsoft may have a lock on the desktop, but the desktop is no longer the king in the consumer's mind.
A study one year on is useful, but what would be even more interesting would be a longer term study focusing on the experiences of students as they grow up and leave school.
It would be interesting to see whether using Linux and a non-MS office suite affected them academically, and as they start to look for work - particularly with many jobs coming with a requirement to be proficient in Microsoft Office (try getting Libre Office past those HR drones). Perhaps a higher proportion of students than is normal at a girls' school will end up working in the tech industry, having had more experience at school using a Linux system.
Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (P)anic
"There are still a few that are of the view that I can get rid of Microsoft Word when I can pry it from them."
I've been using linux on my primary computer for 5 years now and I'm still the same way - LibreOffice, OpenOffice and StarOffice can't hold a candle to MS Word, especially when you need to share your documents with collaborators. Same goes for the open "equivalents" of Powerpoint - if you make (or even modify) a slideshow in Libre, Open or Star, you have about zero percent chance of your presentation looking the same on any other computer.
I think a lot of people, including myself, will resist giving up MS Office until either a)EVERYONE uses the open equivalents or b)the open equivalents flawlessly port files to and from MS Office without formatting or display issues. I also think neither of these is likely to happen any time soon.
Just FYI, LyX sucks at WYSIWYG document creation and editing. TeX is hard and LyX makes it easier, but it's still nowhere near ready for the masses.
See, Microsoft had this brilliant idea to change their default document view from "Normal" to "Print Layout" that shows how the document would (should) look like when printed out. It's a small change; both views were present already. I don't even know if Microsoft came up with the idea first. But the difference is significant. One view makes Word true WYSIWYG while the other meant was just a glorified text editor. In case you haven't noticed, the Normal view is no more.
LyX is still lacking, in that, and many other ways.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
no, things such as "control panel" also changed
How many actually need or want WYSIWYG then? Wouldn't most people who use Office be better of with WYGIMBTWYCD (What You Get Is Much Better Than What You Could Design)?
Actually, it was the most drastic in the kernel. The 7 kernel is radically rewritten from the XP kernel. That's why it supports multiple processors so much better and is dramatically faster (considering how much more it's doing).
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
LyX is a project that I'm very fond of. It doesn't follow the WYSIWYG model at all. Instead, it leverages TeX's different way of thinking about document creation entirely; separate the data from the presentation and manage the creation of both separately. The whole idea is to concentrate on the task of writing without getting distracted by constant re-formatting challenges. It works quite well once you learn to relax and not obsess over every paragraph and image placement while you're writing.
Frankly, I think LyX creates some of the most beautiful printed documentation I've ever seen. Sadly, it doesn't do so well at e-publishing yet. I have hopes that will change, though. I would love to use it to handle all of my document creation needs.
As it is, I end up writing in LyX, exporting to .xhtml, then using Sigil and other tools to get a clean, good looking .epub output.
Switch to Apple and lose weight. Not because it makes you a "hipster", you just can't afford any food after buying the whole Apple line.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
FWIW, I've noticed that it's very slow to load in general.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
All one needs is a reasonable set of import / export tools.
Can't be done.
Two years ago I had to convert some important WordPerfect documents to Word, and then to Excel. They had a lot of tables, outlines and columns. It didn't come out right, and I had to manually correct every page. The margins, columns and tabs were changed. One page in WordPerfect ran over one page in Word. Text didn't fit into tables. Some of the fonts were missing. There were workarounds that didn't work any more.
In searching the subject on the web, I found a message from someone who claimed to have worked for Microsoft during the original rollout of Word, on the compatibility with WordPerfect. He said that it was very important to MS to have compatibility with WordPerfect, since that was the installed base. Potential customers had their own historical documents in WordPerfect, and they had to exchange documents with clients who still used WordPerfect. MS put a lot of work into it, but they couldn't get them to convert exactly. The two programs approached document formatting in different ways.
Consider a typical Microsoft potential customer. A law firm may have 100 lawyers, each of whom writes 10 documents a day. The lawyer's life is tied up in his documents. The documents are the firm memory. When a new case comes up, it's important for them to be able to search their documents to find out whether and how they've dealt with this matter before. They want to go back for decades. Lawyers have lots of stories about how an old partner says, "I remember we did something like this back in 1960," and they find an old memo that wins a million-dollar case. Usually it's important to get the documents back in exactly the same format, because, for example, the page citations have to line up.
Another problem was that they had staff, like secretaries and paralegals, who were expert in the sometimes-esoteric language and style of law, with its footnotes and citations, who already knew WordPerfect. These are not stupid people, and some of them were experts in the details of WordPerfect, but most of them were not. They could learn a new word processing program, but it would take time, and even more important, during the learning process they could make mistakes. Microsoft had an elaborate learning mode in the earlier versions of Word for people who were switching from WordPerfect in which it would automatically give you your "error" when you tried to use a WordPerfect command. Some of the WordPerfect commands had no equivalent in Word. You had to use an elaborate workaround. And it wasn't just converting documents. You could easily search all the files in a WordPerfect directory for a text string. You couldn't do that any more in Word.
For a law firm like that, it's an enormous job to switch from one word processing program to another. They did it, mostly during the transition from DOS to Windows, but they wouldn't do it again without a good reason.
For a while, you could open PowerPoint, save the default, blank presentation, open it in Impress, and it wouldn't be rendered correctly.
(I don't know when that was fixed, but a PPTX "import filter" was added in OpenOffice 3.0 and it lasted through at least 3.2. Sometime between OO 3.2 [Feb 2010] and LibreOffice 4.0 [Feb 2013] was a dramatic improvement in accuracy, and at least that and another basic slide that I used to test work now. 4.0 is still missing antialiasing and dealing with some of the more "advanced" stuff, like shapes, but at least it seems to be able to render text on a colored slide reasonably accurately now. :-))
Though moving an icon around on the panel (you have to awkwardly add spacers and can never quite put things where you want them) and changing the panel background color (still haven't bothered to figure that out) are still unnecessarily more difficult today than they were in KDE ten years ago. I still use KDE but I'm disappointed by the little things like that.
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