linuxmemes

I've tried, at least in theory, to migrate an entire university's classroom computers to Linux. Even in the absence of technical limitations, the one obstacle I can't overcome is entirely human. ~~The living fossils~~ Our esteemed tenured professors refuse to change their habits because they need their Netbeans, they need their Eclipses, they need their Visual Studios. In a lot of ways, it feels like wayland-protocols' governance. A single NACK from a stubborn fool kneecaps the entire project, and now the university gets to spend hundreds of thousands of euros upgrading the computer labs because the perfectly usable computers are juuuust barely outside Win11's requirements.

Sidebar: Back when I was a student at that same university, when Windows was small enough to allow dual-booting with Ubuntu from the same SSD, my Prog-1 teacher insisted on using Joe. He hated Vim, Emacs, and Nano with an equal passion.

Edit: Just to give some validation to the people who need it, I should point out that Nix would be the ideal OS. We use Clonezilla to deploy a painstakingly prepared golden image of Windows with all applications and configuration changes before every semester. If a teacher forgets to request a software (despite the five separate e-mails and posters around the university), we have to pray that it's available either as an MSI or through winget, otherwise we have to manually remote into each affected computer (up to several hundred) and install it one by one.

I would give my left testicle and half my liver for the ability to have a centrally hosted Nix config file that can be edited whenever and then deployed as the computers come online.