Hi all, the private school I work at has a tonne of old windows 7/8 era desktops in a student library. The place really needs upgrades but they never seem to prioritise replacing these machines. Ive installed Linux on some older laptops of mine and was wondering if you all think it would be worth throwing a light Linux distro on the machines and making them somewhat usable for a web browsing experience for students? They’re useless as is, running ancient windows OS’s. We’re talking pre-7th gen i5’s and in some cases pentium machines here.
Might be pointless but wonder what you guys think?
The hardware is totally fine, Linux requirements didnt really change at all in the last years.
KDE Plasma is a really well maintained desktop, poorly also with a ton of customization. It has a very familiar user experience. GNOME is also nice but not familiar at all.
On these machines, recommendations:
best would be to always delete the user account, so they need to store stuff on a network drive. That way they cannot permanently break a desktop, but you still dont need active directory stuff.
Be aware that managing many PCs is work. Keep it as simple as possible, install apps as systemwide flatpaks, keep the OS minimal, automate updates.
Maybe have a look at ansible, I think it is complex but the learning curve is worth the effort if you need to manage more than 4 machines.
Thanks for the advice re: management. Definitely something we’ll need to plan for.