Help me choose linux's best option for public school lab (distro, desktop, etc.)

I apologize if my english isn’t perfect in how you would say it daily, but I hope it’ll help with Linux popularity and as a reference for future days.

For this post specifically I want opinions regarding what would be best for school lab of tech vocational high school (for both computer networking and software engineering).

  1. Package update frequency:
  • A. Years per update (Debian, OpenSuse Leap)
  • B. Every 6 month (Ubuntu/Fedora)
  • C. Rolling Release (Debian Sid or Arch but update whenever (every week/month/semester/year))
  1. Desktop environment:
  • A. Gnome
  • B. KDE Plasma
  • C. Cinnamon
  • D. Lightweight DE (XFCE, LXQT, etc.)
  • E. Other DE (Mate, Budgie, etc.)
  • F. Stacking Window Manager (Fluxbox, IceWM, Openbox, etc)
  • G. TIling or Dynamic WM
  1. Community or Company Distro?
  • A. Community Distro
  • B. Company Distro
  1. Display server protocol:
  • A. Xorg
  • B. Wayland
  1. File System:
  • A. EXT4
  • B. BTRFS
  • C. Other
  1. Immutable?
  • A. Not Immutable
  • B. Immutable
  1. Functionality
  • A. General Purpose (Debian, Arch, OpenSuse)
  • B. Specific Purpose (Debian Edu, Parrot Linux, AV linux, etc.)

Let me know your opinion, perhaps I missed some critical question or maybe some question above isn’t that important to consider.

CameronDev,

I think you are missing the most critical features, stability and support. You need whatever distro you pick to be solid. No one cares about the file system or whether it is immutable or not, your users need the computer to work when they use it, and nothing else matters.

You also need to be confident you can update and upgrade safely and easily, any risk of a broken update will make your life a misery when that happens.

Kickstart support, or some form of automated deployment will also be extremely valuable so that you can easily redeploy broken boxes with minimal effort. And some form of remote config/admin will also be extremely valuable. You dont want to have to do updates manually one at a time.

I would pick a general purpose commercially backed OS, so that if you need it later, you can pay for support if there is a problem. And you need to write some basic usage guides, because no matter which distro you pick, if its not Windows, your users will complain when they cant do X the same way it works on Windows.

Sinfaen,

This 100%. Even if you don’t like canonical, you can get Ubuntu for free and then later pay for support if you need. They have experience managing fleets of systems.

There’s a post on Reddit where a Brazilian state government org is testing out Ubuntu at scale.

backhdlp,
@backhdlp@iusearchlinux.fyi avatar
  1. I’d say go for a rolling, maybe do updates on weekends
  2. The students will very likely appreciate the customizability of Plasma or Cinnamon; if you want them to focus on work, GNOME (probably with some extensions) would be better. Tilers are a bad idea, because they take some getting used to
  3. Doesn’t really matter, company distros might be paid tho, and that can obviously get expensive
  4. Wayland if your DE has good support (i.e. is GNOME or Plasma), otherwise X
  5. Btrfs’ snapshotting capabilities might be useful to rollback the system to something working if the students fuck something up
  6. Immutable without sudo access should be the safest to hand over to people that you don’t want to ruin anything
  7. I don’t know enough about specific purpose distros

If you already know Nix, NIxOS would be a good choice

pastermil,

Linux Mint

loops,

There are also distros that are meant specifically for educational settings:

itsfoss.com/educational-linux-distros/

Note that I don’t think that Endless OS restricts it’s usage.

PoliticallyIncorrect,

Linux Mint

HumanPerson,

I would probably do debian 12 with kde, xorg, ext4. Not familiar with debian edu though.

possiblylinux127,

I would go with Xfce4 in this case as it is much simpler in terms of UI and complexity

Revan343,

I’d lean towards Xfce as well, but for other reasons; school computers aren’t typically the most beefy machines, so a lightweight desktop environment is probably preferable

possiblylinux127,

Gnome will run on anything made in the last 10 years. Computers won’t last that long in a school environment.

Xfce4 is lighter but it isn’t that big of difference. Xfce4 might also have less of a learning curve.

The reason I suggested xfce4 is that it works well with Debian releases.

Revan343,

My experience with Gnome vs Xfce has been Gnome being sluggish; there’s a difference between running and running well/quickly

lemmyreader,

Package update frequency:

With Ubuntu and with Debian there is also LTS (Long Term Support) to choose from. For Ubuntu this is five years for the default Ubuntu. I believe it is three years for the community flavors (Kubuntu, Xubuntu and so on). Personally I find the pushing of snaps and Ubuntu Pro by Ubuntu somewhat annoying and confusing, so I’d for Debian at your school.

barbara,

deleted_by_author

    •
    possiblylinux127,

    I think it there are many wrong choices. Most of them revolve around long term management

    CameronDev,

    I use Arch, but it probably is a completely wrong distro for a school computer lab. One botched update/upgrade and the entire lab is broken. There is also no kickstart support, so deploying lab full of machines will be a very manual process.

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