It must have been traumatic for that Arch user to discover such rebellion in their child. /s
On a more serious note, if my kids find this post: I hope you know we can talk about closed source software if you’re curious about it - and about maintaining a proper virtual infrastructure to protect the rest of the network from it.
Always use protection
I don’t need protection when using closed source because the closed source has its own protection.
Can I share an episode?
We’re a Window$ free house; Linux is the daily driver on every single computer we have.
I have school age children. They have IT classes. I set up a machine with Mint, clean install, to serve has the school workhorse. Not one task assigned at school can not be done in the Linux box. My child came home a few worried a few times because the teacher disliked having a linux box in the room.
What happens is the teacher is terrified has they cannot load a single piece of software on that machine, as they do with all the other students, at will. The notion of explaining to all the other students they need to go to some site to download some program while my child just needs to fetch it (or already has it pre installed) from a secure repository is baffling. The knowledge that that humble and rather older machine can not be trivialy tampered with is mind disturbing.
At some point the teacher explained how to maintain the system (clean temp files and random junk Windows collects over time by just having programs installed and removed) and looked at my child and chidded that was something she could not do.
I taught my kid how to do basic system maintenance. Through the console. Like a boss. They upgraded the system while they colleagues were “busy” hunting down temp files.
Damn, new copypasta just dropped.
I feel for the teacher, Windows is still the predominant OS that is used by businesses worldwide and it’s unlikely to change any time soon. Ensuring the kids have some familiarity with it is important as when a lot of them go into the workplace their employer isn’t going to give them a choice of OS to use. A number of schools in my country now provide kids with Windows laptops that can be managed through group policies. I can imagine the teacher feeling frustrated at times as their teaching material will be geared to Windows and may face challenges in being able to grade your kid.
It’s great you have given your kid experience in using Linux and that should set them up really well to working in a Linux based environment. Hopefully one day other OS will be added to teacher’s curriculum so that all kids have the opportunity to get hands on experience.
If anything more recently schools have been going the opposite direction. Moving away from Windows towards Chrome Books which is probably even worse from a being prepared for the future stand point.
