David Phillips wrote: > You're wrong and are spreading FUD. > > MS licenses for schools can be dirt cheap. I recall Windows and Office > being available for around $10 each. Well I've certainly never purchased any MS crap for schools or otherwise, so I am quite surprised it is available that cheap. Even so, it is still $640 that a school doesn't have. > Linux is certainly not "the best choice for any school computer lab". Here > are just a couple of reasons why: > > Programs that are used in the real world often only run on Windows. These > programs might include MS Office, CAD, circuit designers and testers, etc. > While the difference between Microsoft Office and other office suites may be > negligable both to a casual office user and to a power user, the differences > can be huge to both a heavy office user and an average computer user. If > the purpose of a course is to teach how to use a specific application, then > you need to be able to run that application. Keep in mind I'm talking about K12 schools, not technical schools or anything like that. The "real world" doesn't matter in this case. Students need to be able to word process and browse the web. For the most part, that's it. Sure if there's some specialized CAD application that's necessary for some technical class or something, a lone Windows machine can be used. As for office suites, as always, it's a matter of what one learns. Students are certainly not power users, and don't need any advanced features (not to suggest such advanced features are unavailable in OO.org or other alternatives). I can't believe I'm actually having to argue this here of all places! > Linux is not the easiest OS to fix. Schools often have to rely on teachers > to fix problems with computers. Giving them something that is difficult to > fix means there will be less computers for students to use. From a > reliability and TCO standpoint, Apple might come out ahead. Now who's spreading FUD? True, with no prior knowledge, Linux is certainly not the easiest OS to fix, but it is also the hardest OS to break! Once a system is setup by a semi-competent administrator, there is very little chance short of a hardware failure that something at the OS level will go wrong. > Promoting Linux is fine, but start thinking about why Linux is a better > solution from all standpoints. The other reason it is a superior solution which I haven't even mentioned is ease of administration. The lack of crashing and maintenance alone would save countless hours of support requests and such. > http://www.lfsp.org/ Yes I am familiar with all of these, I meant *locally*. > When I was in middle school, we had 386s. They ran DOS applications like > Microsoft Works just fine. Do you really need ten times more computing > resources to run a word processor? Uh, yes, if you want it to be graphical, including pictures or anything else. But it does not need to be significantly more powerful. Schools seem to upgrade far too often and buy systems that are horribly overpowered. This is exactly my point, and why old hardware should be used as terminal servers instead of thrown out. > The next time you have an old computer that seems like a piece of junk that > can't run anything think about this: When it was new, there was a lot of > software available for it that ran great. Does modern software do that much > more? Obviously it depends on the usage, but usually, yes. Especially in the Microsoft world, you have no hope of running Office 2002 on a 486. Ryan _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list