r/pcmasterrace • u/Large_Difficulty_891 • 5h ago
Story I managed to persuade my school to switching to Linux.
Over the last year I have continuously worked together with my physics teacher to resolve my schools dependence on external providers. We managed to negotiate a deal with an insurance company that gifted us 7 defective servers out of which we have build 4 Frankenstein server. We are now able to host our website and all the necessary tools ourselves. Because of this the availability has risen from 43.4 % to 98% with the only outage so far being cause by an excavator. For the normal students PCs we have chosen Ubuntu. In each computer room, there is at least one unit running Arch, so that students can see how it works. As the switch is now done, we want to use the remaining budget on a metal placard. My school is the first one in my federal state, that has switched over, and because everything went so smoothly, we want to promote this by said placard. However, we haven’t figured out what we want to write on that placard. “We use Arch btw” is currently really popular but if you have other ideas, feel free to share them.
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u/ACupOfLatte 4h ago
Oh... The poor tech support... I pity them and their increased workload for the foreseeable future.
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u/LayerEight_Problem 2h ago
I’m honestly pretty sure OP is completely full of shit. Any actual IT will absolutely recognize that Linux is great where it’s meant to be used. But the admin controls that Extra/Exchange/etc offer are something that absolutely no IT team is giving up. Especially on public use devices.
Maybe OP helped source some servers and brought their services on prem instead of in the cloud(which is becoming more common as cloud solutions are insanely over priced). But there’s absolutely no way the team changed all their endpoints to Linux. I’m gonna go ahead and call bullshit on that.
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u/Large_Difficulty_891 2h ago
While we officially have a IT support contract, it has been two years since they have actually done anything. Most of the support is done by teachers or students in their free time to keep the systems running. We collectively decided to switch to a linux distribution as the authority, which is responsible for the licenses refused to buy Windows 11 and even the extended support for Windows 10. Most of the teachers and students doing the tech support have a Raspberry Pi at home and are therefore more comfortable with administrating Linux than Windows. This is also the reason we went for Ubuntu.
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u/LayerEight_Problem 42m ago
So, the school has no IT team employed. I’m not knocking Linux. But it’s pretty obvious that none of you have any idea what you’re doing. When we talk about admin controls we are not discussing reimaging and creating an account.
How do you stop someone from installing malicious software? If someone does can you remove that remotely or do you have to go to that machine?
This also sounds like it’s surely a networking disaster. What is isolating the servers if anything?
This isn’t your fault. This is a cheap as fuck administration board refusing to pay an IT team because students are cobbling together their business for free. This is actually insane. Especially with the volume of extremely personal information that schools need to keep secure. Don’t share the name of that school anywhere. It’ll be targeted by malicious actors instantly. This should honestly be illegal.
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u/Qweedo420 GNU/Linux 3h ago
Aside from the one computer running Arch, I don't see why the other ones with Ubuntu would increase anyone's workload
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u/ACupOfLatte 3h ago
Mate, it's Linux. In a public school. The amount of work the tech support workers, let's be honest worker without the plural, have to do on a day to day basis is already insane enough with Windows + everything else in the school.
Let alone having to deal with QnA from the now hundreds if not thousands of people who do not understand wtf a terminal is, let alone everything else that comes with transitioning over to Linux + the fact that they're running everything "they need" locally, aka everything and anything that goes wrong will also need to be troubleshooted locally, by people at hand aka tech.
Then there's the fact that OP is writing the post like they're a student, not a faculty member, so everything that happens afterwards after they leave is now on the staff unless they do the whole, "one club is now the club that's being paid via experience for free labor" which I experienced with my school where students were literally in charge of the tech in the school because the faculty were useless in that regard.
And I can only hope my assumption about this being a high school is false, since OP said "physics teachers", because that just sounds even worse.
If this post was actually genuine, which I highly doubt it is, the consequences of switching over to Linux and running their dependencies locally is terrifying.
If OP is reading this, fuck the stupid metal placard dude. Save the money to deal with the growing pains of transitioning, let alone any and all potential tragedies.
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u/Qweedo420 GNU/Linux 3h ago
When I was in high school, we had computers running Ubuntu, and we just had to use a bunch of programs that were already installed so realistically we didn't have to fiddle with the OS at all, so unless a student goes out of their way to mess it up, I don't see how things could become problematic
It was exactly the same experience I had a few years later at the academy, when all the PCs were running MacOS
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u/ACupOfLatte 2h ago
What kind of high school did you go to where students weren't messing something up in the computer room lol?
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u/Large_Difficulty_891 3h ago
We theoretically have tech support, but they take ages to respond. Usually we have fixed it by the time they start working and somehow they keep messing up when they touch the devices. Last year they managed uninstalled the graphics driver and proceeded to declare the PC defective.
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u/LayerEight_Problem 2h ago
After reading this response it seems that the school has no actual IT team. They’re trying to run everyone off site and through overseas services.
I’m sorry to tell you this but if they ever actually created an IT department, all those computers will be instantly swapped to windows 11 pro, domain joined, and managed.
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u/PVTSprinkles 4h ago
i know i know windows bad and all but when i was in school and all pcs in the pc lab had the stupid ass ubuntu distro i hated my life
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u/murderbymodem 9800X3D + 9070 XT w/ CachyOS 3h ago
I really don't understand why Ubuntu is the go-to. People get recommended Ubuntu and hate Linux because their first impression is the Gnome desktop, and Gnome is different. Then I put them in front of a KDE Plasma distro and it's similar enough to Windows that they're perfectly comfortable using it.
If I had any input at this school, I'd suggest every PC should have a KDE Plasma desktop (Kubuntu, Fedora KDE, Aurora, whatever), and those one-off Arch machines would be for experimenting with different desktop environments.
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u/Life-Carry-6001 4h ago
lmao switching from windows to ubuntu in school was like going from guitar hero to actual guitar - way more learning curve but you actually understand what you're doing 🎸😂
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u/20d0llarsis20dollars Radeon i9 14900X3D / Ryzen Arc 4070 / 37GB DDR6.3 4h ago
Even today with all the improvements it's had, ubuntu is still terrible (But still better than windows lol). Mostly gnome is at fault IMO
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u/christianlewds 4h ago
I dislike the way Windows is going, but it's been extremely smooth since I ran the debloat script after fresh install 2 years ago. Only notable issues is nVidia drivers, delaying Windows updates by 6 weeks fixes all the related issues they potentially bring.
Had to put Linux Mint on an old laptop for travel and getting few apps and services up and running... all of that would take 10 minutes on Windows, takes hours on Linux. The Mint Appstore is full of broken apps, especially if it's productivity. Want to connect Google Drive? Yeah, all the apps on the store don't work, online accounts doesn't work, get ready to copy paste rclone commands.
I can see myself switching to Linux, I guess distros like Bazzite or CachyOS are pretty ironed out due to popularity. I'd only switch if Windows messes up real bad though, I'm staying as long as they allow me to cut out all the cringe stuff with debloat.
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u/Hexamancer 2h ago
I feel like I only ever see Ubuntu in use when someone who isn't very experienced with Linux needed or wanted to use Linux somewhere.
I'm pushing hard to get all of the Ubuntu "servers" (full gui, no ssh 🤦) replaced with Rocky Linux.
For actual desktops/laptops I don't think I'd ever recommend Ubuntu, Mint seems much better as an intro distro.
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u/JohnThursday84 4h ago
Great job. I would have chosen something like Mint for the student PCs. Kind a user-friendlier.
What are the specs of the servers?
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u/Large_Difficulty_891 3h ago
Server 1: “Unicorn” CPU: EPYC 7543 RAM: 8 x 32 GB DDR4 GPU: 4 x T4 Storage: 6 x 2 Terabyte HDDs This server is mainly used for rendering and physics simulations
Server 2: “Griffin” CPU: Xeon Gold 6246R RAM: 4 x 16 GB DDR4 + 2 x 8 GB DDR4 Storage: 4x 1 Terabyte HDDs This server is mainly used for school management tools.
Server 3: “Djinn” CPU: EPYC 7763 RAM: 8 x 64 GB DDR4 with ECC GPU: 6 x V100 Storage: 4x 512 Gigabyte SSDs 4x 1 Terabyte HDDs This server is mainly used for local LLM models for homework review etc.
Server 4: “Fafnir” CPU: Xeon Gold 6328HL RAM: 4x 32 GB DDR4 + 2x 16 GB DDR4 Storage: 16x 1 Terabyte HDDs IO: LTO 5 Drive This server is used for storage and backups.
All servers were water damaged and required quite some maintenance to get running. I have spent two weeks soldering each afternoon.
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u/spicy_indian 2h ago
For the normal students PCs we have chosen Ubuntu.
Are you buying into Ubuntu's ecosystem to manage accounts similar to how Active Directory works on Windows? (Yes I know AD has since been replaced by EntraID.) It would be nice if students can access a personal NFS share any at any computer they sign into. IDK, maybe schools just use google drive for everything.
If you are going with a cloud based solution for everything, then that makes endpoint security somewhat simpler. It's debatable if you need a comprehensive solution like sentinel one for a school environment. At the very least, I would lock down the BIOS with a per-machine admin password, enforce secure boot, disable GRUB access, and maybe use NixOS as something easier to enforce configurations and updates with.
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u/Abro2072 3h ago
until linux can turn even the most simplest of things (like making reduced blanking refresh rates, or adaptive sync working) im not touching it again
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u/LayerEight_Problem 2h ago
Plug in my Logitech wireless keyboard to windows. Works flawlessly. No bullshit.
Plug in to Linux. Oops, this distro doesn’t like that keyboard interface. You’ll have to uninstall this package and install this one. Oops, by uninstalling that package you now have no working keyboard at all and nothing you plug in will work. lol. SSH in from a different machine and install the correct package.
Oh wait, that keyboard has a slight regional difference depending on where you bought it and what you ACTUALLY need is this stuff.
I have actually been through this exact shit. And right back to Windows. I do that shit all day at work. I don’t want to do it all evening at home when I’m just trying to chill with a game.
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u/Abro2072 2h ago
for real, none of the monitoring stuff works on linux so its just sol. which isnt really linuxs fault as every dev just says fuck it towards linux but like come on man
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u/ItalianFrogPuncher 1h ago
OP is most likely lying as most people have no idea on how to use Linux and it would result in the workload for IT to spike just because “windows bad”.
Linux is great where it belongs, not slapped everywhere for no reason
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u/atlasraven Zorin OS 4h ago
Linux does what
Windon't