this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2025
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I work at a university with several hundred classroom computers. They don't get upgraded in any kind of timely manner. Until last year, over a hundred of them still used hard drives. About half of them have HDMI or DP sockets, but the monitors don't, and they'll stay until they're no longer functional at all.
We are in a bit of a bind because Windows 11 support is questionable and replacing even a few classrooms is a massive investment.
Ah, makes sense. I still have 2 spinning hard drives in my desktop. I just move them over whenever I build a new desktop. I've been thinking about buying a few more NVMe drives and getting rid of the old spinners once and for all, but NVMe drives above 1 TB are a serious investment, and these spinners are 5 TB each.
All (3) university computer labs I've been to had Linux, why would you use Windows for uni? Most lessons should be relatively program agnostic right?
Do you really think we haven't explored that option? My dream is to set up a nix or ansible script to automate the entire process. 95% of the applications required by the teachers have Linux releases. It's the remaining 5% that prevent it. Some applications depend on Hyper-V virtualization. Others run fine through Wine on my idealized test machine, but I'm not taking that risk in the highly heterogenous, outdated classrooms. Many of the classes are specialized courses about a particular vendor's systems that are far from plug-and-play on the best day, and we can't force them to rewrite the course for Linux.
Most of our teachers are jaded old fucks from a mathematics background. Some are friends of the dean. They bitch and complain if they can't use their favourite Java IDE, and I dread to imagine what would happen if they had to adapt to a different desktop environment.
Many of our students have never seen a computer that wasn't a smartphone and have issues navigating Windows. I had to help a teacher once because the students couldn't even type
qtdesignerinto a terminal.Besides, we don't have three computer labs, we have 30, and all of them must be configured the same (or as close as possible) because we don't have any input about which class is held where.
That's why we use Windows.
I feel really bad for your IT department.
Our IT "department" is two people and I'm one of them.
That's about what I expected. Do you at least have a central management system for the computers?
Not really. We have remote access (ssh, WinRM, Ansible, VNC), but our brief experiment with AD was a trainwreck.