Ban Windows at schools

I wouldn't "ban Windows at school" as a whole but I would:

• ban schools from installing windows in school computers
  • teachers and students can still use it on their own computers, if they want
• ban teachers from requiring windows-only software
  • regardless of what you use at school, teachers would often require MS office or Adobe for homework, which would force students to use windows at home

While I agree with the petition, it shouldn't be limited to Windows, it should be about software freedom...

https://www.gnu.org/education/edu-why.html.en

https://www.gnu.org/education/edu-schools.html.en

That actually makes a lot of sense, if you remove concepts such as "but Windows is already customary here" from your head. From scratch, you'd never want to do this.

If such a petition exists for the Netherlands or EU-wide, I'd sign and subscribe/support.

Fuck it, rant time.

I was IT lead at an education trust (kinda like a school district but bigger) covering K-21 for a long time, managing a few thousand endpoints for a few thousand students. Laptops, desktops, tablets, smartphones, digital signage and embedded; devices belonging to schools, partner organisations, staff BYOD and student remote learning; structured IT suites in school campuses, stateless networks for anything portable, antique appliances that simply must work but also be accessible to particular people from anywhere; it goes on and it never ends.

No-one has time for that.

From a few central interfaces, I could deploy an application to every device. And, I could make sure that a particular website was accessible to every student from their fifteenth birthday, not a day before. And, I could make sure that any device a Ukrainian refugee logs into speaks Ukrainian. And, I could remove any bloatware. And, I could make sure that when a brand new laptop is drop-shipped to a teacher's home address directly from the distributor it will automatically configure itself with everything they need the second they connect it to their home Wifi without me even having to touch it. And, I could apply a photo-of-the-month to every device, even overlaying it with the appropriate school's logo. And I could disable (or force enable) any unwanted hardware or software features on any device. And I could make sure that every student's web traffic was appropriately filtered and, if nessecary, scrutinised.

And I could prove that all of it was working: I could prove it to staff, to parents, to governors and, when it came to it, I could prove it to the police and to lawyers. "When", not "if".

Forget schools for a second, look instead at big corporations. They are ruthlessly profit focused, but they all run Windows, Office, SharePoint, 365, etc because even though it costs money, it's cheaper overall and comes with a lot of protection, both technical and legal. Schools get that stuff basically for free, and it just works. Linux isn't there yet, not by a long shot, and no education authority worth their salt is going to take the risk of being the first to experiment with their student's wellbeing, let alone curriculum, for effectively - in their eyes - zero benefit.

To be blunt: when one of the children you are responsible for safeguarding is the victim of an attempted kidnapping that was only possible because of lax data security, no-one is going to have any tolerance for your personal philosophy about software licensing or your home-spun scripts. Ask me how I know.

Also, if your schools are letting advertisers/social media/whatever inspect student's data, that's nothing to do with the technology and everything to do with mismanagement: forcing them to manage yet another OS isn't going to fix that.

TLDR: If you want to make Linux replace Windows in schools, you first need to figure out how to make Linux replace Windows in hospitals, call centres and Fortune 500 corporations.

I agree with Stallman and others on this sort of thing, it should be illegal for any public institution to use proprietary, corporate software in any capacity.

Public institutions are supposed to serve and benefit the public good first and foremost. The idea that they can do that equally well or better by partnering with mega-corps who's only fundamental drive is to generate as much profit as possible for their shareholders, is idiotic.

There's a brilliant man who just gave a talk at Defcon who had previously given a talk at TED where he said we should ban all computers in school. 1 sec, I'll get the link

Cliff Stoll! I highly recommend watching his Defcon talk as well. https://youtu.be/Gj8IA6xOpSk

Good luck!

You may already be aware but perhaps some of the rationale from these projects could help bolster your argument:

https://eu-os.eu/

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/petitions/en/petition/content/html?petitionNumber=0729%2F2024

https://www.numerique.gouv.fr/sinformer/espace-presse/souverainete-numerique-reduction-dependances-extra-europeennes/

I would also ban Ai in schools. Some teachers force the children to use Ai.

Not letting sunlight into classrooms seems cruel to the children.

One big thing you need to think about is accessibility. This is something that came up in a conversation with a local representative in the UK - for children in public schools it is a requirements that any technology have good accessibility and not leave anyone behind. And accessibility tools on linux are, suffice to say, not great. Especially when compared with those on other closed systems. My local government ended up going with iPads for kids in schools, and the accessibility tooling on these was a factor in that choice.

In the US we have a law that says we must keep student records confidential. Yet at my school our email for both faculty and students is provided by TinyFlaccid. I know for a fact that they are scanning and indexing all of that email because that's the only way they could make reply suggestions. They also have copilot enabled and there is no way to turn it off.

Ironically, the US is practically already off MS in schools and has been for a while but it's Mac and Google Suite that took over. I literally had a college student in my class ask "What is Excel?" as it was listed as an option to conduct calculations.

It's not better, but I thought that was funny. Big reason that happened, btw, Apple gifted whole computer labs to schools back when it was trying to get market share in the 90s, and now Google does likewise with Chromebook. Too bad there isn't a Linux organization with enough money to do something like that, as it's much more effective than banning something.

I'd start by banning tablets, what the fuck is the point of "learning" IT stuff on a glorified 10 inch phone? Get them fucking laptops, even better with Linux, but I feel like even going BACK to Windows PCs would be an improvement at this point, sad.

Also ban Google. I think we should ban any schoolwork in required courses that requires students to agree to any third-party EULAs, such as Google account and Windows OS. For selective courses, considering the de facto status that many fields don't have a mature enough open source software, banning is a bit exceeding proportionality IMHO. And offering Windows computer is probably ok as long as it's not the default choice IMHO.

In my freshman year in the Electrical Engineering department, I took a required computer programming course, the course that I supposed it to be most aware of the existence of GNU/Linux, free format, and so on. However, it uses Google Sheets for homeworks and demands a Google Drive link of an exe for final team project and YouTube link for presentation. When they let students evaluate each other, I just got a bunch of exe, half of which doesn't even open in Wine.

I also think they every school should offer NextCloud. Otherwise when team work occurs, Google Drive/Docs/Slides/Sheets is the de facto only choice.

BTW, I think LaTeX with git is more customizable and extensible and should be taught instead of teaching MS Office stuff. I actually take all my notes in LaTeX in a GitHub repo and do reproducible compilations.

I was thinking this 20+ years ago and it makes me sad that Windows is still treated like a product worth using. My work machine is my most hated device in terms of software. Such garbage.

and Google (classroom, chromebooks etc). Treating children as products is abuse.

I wouldn't worded as "ban windows" (monkey hand they give the ipads), but as implement Linux on the curriculum

In the US they use Chromebooks, not really any better but they do have Linux under the hood.

Promoting open source software and funding them is better than banning proprietary software. Improving data protection laws will also be more productive as a blanket solution rather than selectively banning companies with suspicious data practices.

would you rather schools force kids to use the miserable devices called "chromebooks" instead?

100% agree and support your determination. Unfortunately, however, it's not gonna happen.

Currently, Microsoft (and other companies, but mainly Microsoft in Poland) offers schools and universities discounted Windows licenses, as well as very cheap or straight up free Microsoft 365 packages for all students. It comes with 24/7 technical support, which education facilities desperately need, since staff is tech illiterate and they can't (or can, but won't) afford IT departments.

Furthermore, Poland is an American puppet state, and won't make any decision that substantially hampers American interests. As we've been shown many times over, even in just the last two years.

It's so obvious that children and students, especially university students in tech fields, should work mostly with FOSS, unless a FOSS option is unavailable (very rare cases). Not only would they get more meaningful knowledge and skills, but the country would reduce its dependence on the US Empire as well. If only governments ever did the obvious good thing.

The monkey's paw curls. All windows have been removed from every school building. Solid walls in every classroom.

This is a nice idea. Wish you good luck!

My university had several lecture halls without windows, and it sucked!

Go for it, but please consider the platform you use for that carefully and get as many partners as possible beforehand - gives much bigger chances it reaches more people.

Pracowałem przy kampaniach społecznych, w razie czego służę doświadczeniem.

Makes no sense. If you ban windows it makes it harder to snipe a school shooter. /s

best thing to include a few screenshots of how easy linux mint is to use and navigate today.

I don't know how much IT experience you have, but at the end of the day when an organization pays for license, they're paying for a fall-guy. They want to have someone to go to when there's a problem with the software, because that's cheaper than everyone needing to hire an expert at whatever issues pop up to be certain it's solved.

They don't want to have a bunch of PCs running whatever distro and domain software the last IT guy felt like going with. And when the next heartbleed/shell shock/spectre happens, they don't want to have to figure out how to get the fix for the flavors of software they went with. They want to be able to say "hey company, this is what we pay you for" and the company to say "all good, we got you".

Of course, it is possible to have both open software, and corporate support. This is why redhat exists. Just understand that your IT dept may have a preference based purely on how easy/hard it makes their job. When my PC has some bug or hw incompatibility, I'm willing to take the time to solve it. But someone who doesn't have that time is going to prefer to just tell the company that made it to solve it.

I'm also on-board with no computers in schools, as someone else brought up. Phones should not be allowed in classrooms. Before we had LLMs running on calculators, my idea was to have a series of optional classes where you build your own calculator starting from logic gates, and that's the only computer you're allowed to use.

Agree, a 100% free distro should be the default in schools. And free programs. No proprietary app should exist on computers.

I thought the Enterprise and LTSC versions didn't have all that?

You should be worried about some other things happening in Poland.

"banning" it will just make it "the cool forbidden thing"

As long as 90% of businesses use it on their desktop it makes sense to teach. Using windows and the common software (photoshop, excel etc.) on it is basically a life skill at this point in time.

I agree with your premise though.

I guess it could be argued the computer proficiency skill is transferable (from Linux at school to Windows at work) as long as there is a significant overlap in the available software, desktop presentation, workflow and control conventions.

One example where it for sure doesn't work is gimp to photoshop. If you wanna know why, go dig out instructions for how to draw a circle in each one. Or try recreating one of the many effects from PS in GEGL. - The workflow is so fundamentally different that if you know one software, it will actually hinder you learning the other, because your intuition will mislead you and you'll be constantly frustrated (which actively hinders learning. There are studies on that)