Hi,
I will be writing legions to my government (Poland) to try to get them to ban Windows from schools. I believe it should be illegal to force children to use systems that are paid and use children data form AI and advertising.
Maybe you will do it as well? Let’s end this insane trend.
My university had several lecture halls without windows, and it sucked!
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.
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.
Just go back to establishing a computer lab with shared resources. We don’t need a laptop in every kid’s backpack. Fewer screens and more books is the answer.
Jup, in an ideal world there would be one or more computer rooms with desktop PCs running whatever fucking immutable Linux distro.
However I’m also kind of torn about books since I DO think they are important, but in practice they were always just super outdated, super politically one-sided, unreasonably heavy and so on. Some kind of middle-ground would be great with a mix of some classes using books and paper and some classes using a cheap laptop with Linux on it. But whatever’s the case, tablets are absolute fucking bullshit.
Edit: hell or just no laptops but WAY more than one computer room so you could literally have some classes exclusively in “regular” rooms and some in computer rooms, idk. JUST NOT FUCKING TABLETS.
Should people use OSS? Yes. Should it be illegal to not to? Hell no.
The advertising caveat there I can get behind, but that’s not about paid vs unpaid.
Policy and legality are two wildly different things.
Agree, a 100% free distro should be the default in schools. And free programs. No proprietary app should exist on computers.
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.
Which given the budgets that most schools have for equipment, software and staff is currently entirely reasonable.
It’s probably doable if a country pushed to create a defacto well documented distribution that’s paired with a MDM and online office suite. Basically replicate a locked down Chromebook environment, a lot of edu resources are online these days so most activity is through the browser.
EU Office appears to be the start down that road.
I mean, hell, Fedora SOAS is a thing.
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
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.
I agree all public institutions should use foss. But what makes you think Poland is an american puppet state?
It’s not just Poland, but like half of the EU. Not due to faults of their own, for the most part, but as usual due to the US Empire forcing weaker countries to do its bidding, and meddling in their elections.
Poland’s current president is an obvious American asset. Whether he works or worked directly with the US or not - he has clearly demonstrated that his loyalties lie with Washington. Just like the previous president, and the one before him, and so on.
Most of the government remains very much pro-US, and pro-Israel as well, both of which are closely tied. Government officials, like the current prime minister, may publicly criticize the US, but then go back to discussing terms favourable for the US or sanctioning Chinese companies at Washington’s request behind closed doors.
The Polish government still continues to buy American-made military equipment.
Just last week prime minister Tusk publicly defended the terrorists who bombed the Nordstream pipeline, echoing both Trump’s and Biden’s rhetoric.
Last year he invited Netanyahu to Poland, completely disregarding the ICC warrant for his arrest. Just as the US was putting sanctions on the ICC for said warrant.
All major Polish companies are being purchased by American corporations, putting the entire Polish economy at serious risk in an event of a conflict between the EU and the US. The government introduced legislation to protect Polish companies from being acquired by foreign ones, but it conveniently ignores any transactions with American companies. In addition to all EU countries, which makes sense, and some more questionable ones such as Israel, Australia, or the UK.
The list goes on and on. A lot of what the current one, as well as previous governments do tends to benefit Washington disproportionately more than it does the EU or even Poland itself.
Not to mention it still appears so lost in its American delusions that it seriously thinks the US will do anything to aid Poland in case of a Russian attack.
Even if this won’t push it throughout it stars people talking about it which is already good.
Also; used to work in a small polish school that run everything on Linux, only windows was a VM for some state software for documents.
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.
I think about this a lot. Living in probably the most digitalized western country, pretty much 100% of the software used is proprietary.
We are so deep in the pockets of Microsoft. It’s disgusting. The same goes for pretty much every medium/large company.
You should be worried about some other things happening in Poland.
“banning” it will just make it “the cool forbidden thing”
some people will use windows because it’s cool and forbidden?
news flash: they’re already using windows
I thought the Enterprise and LTSC versions didn’t have all that?
The monkey’s paw curls. All windows have been removed from every school building. Solid walls in every classroom.
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)
No idea where are you from but in Poland there is no way someone teaches these programs at schools. We teach gimp on windows so no problem here.
Companies use windows at work, because it was used in school. Rather than adapt employees to Linux, better pay for windows (many go for very old and dangerous versions to spare money, and that threaten economy, but it is cheaper).
If workers know Linux, companies would make them work on Linux, rather than pay windows and adapt workers to windows.
As long as Linux is more likely to prevent massive hacks of companies’datas, the gouvernment should push for Linux at school in order to push companies toward their own safety…
It’s interesting to hear Photoshop and GIMP have diverged so much! I haven’t used Photoshop in 20 years but when I initially made the switch it was pretty simple. I guess photo processing has changed a lot in that time, eh? 😅
They don’t need to teach “windows” or “excel”. Working with an “operating system” and a “spreadsheet” is the real value. One can quickly pick up any equivalent technogy as they need to. There’s no good reason to stick to the company that happens to have a monopoly at the time. In fact, it’s better for society that they don’t.
As for photoshop or any media editing program, I’ve never learned that in school anyway. That was just not a thing in any school around where I grew up. Maybe I missed out, but I’d say that elementary and high school curriculums are already pretty busy to focus too much on that kind of work. IME teenagers usually get into that kind of software at their own time and interest. I was into video editing and 3d modeling, but that was never in the curriculum, nor would i advocate for it to be.
