New Post: How to Power Your CS Labs with PureOS

https://puri.sm/posts/how-to-power-your-cs-labs-with-pureos/

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“Utilizing PureOS on the hardware you currently have can be a great way to save costs on hardware while still getting the benefit of using PureOS in the lab.”

I dunno about all that…

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It definitely leaves out context and nuance that I think are important. I get that it’s a marketing message and not a technical one, but I think it would be more responsible to link to a technical article that both goes through that deployment as well as addresses the limitations of running pureOS on most hardware (lack of support of proprietary hardware).

I’m also skeptical that pureOS, or any gnu/linux solution, can provide the level of centralized management that AD+Group Policy can provide. Veyon looks to be a potential MDM option, but it reads like it’s limited to the local network? I’ll have to read up on it and maybe lab it out, but it doesn’t look as mature as something like intune or airwatch.

I understand wanting to be in control of your system, but in the context of things like a computer lab, school issued systems, and enterprise environments, that centralized management and consistent experience with things like roaming profiles is a legitimate piece of the puzzle to contend with that I think this article mostly ignores.

I also think that talking about the privacy aspect of protecting data while ignoring that the solutions whicb are being talked about in a negative light for syncing data provide off-site replicated copies of the data (protect data integrity) that is often itself backed up and not pointing to an alternative is a missed opportunity as Nextcloud replaces the proprietary solutions and allows for that to be internalized and provide an equivalent user experience (protecting that data integrity) in a more privacy respecting way.

I would personally like to see a linked technical article free of the marketing bend. I understand and appreciate that marketing has its place, I just think that there’s a decent sized technical crowd that would prefer a more complete view of what the caveats are before going down this path, running into unexpected but avoidable issues, and being forced by the financial side of the house to use the proprietary solution(s) to just get it done and then that being the bad taste left in the mouth for years to come.

That was the main thing I thought. For example, I don’t think nouveau is good enough for any graphics design class (I could be wrong on that, though).

I think it’s more a totally technical crowd since the party concerned would be the school’s IT department.

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Would love to see it happen though.

It isn’t only a marketing message. It’s also a financial message:

many proprietary offerings from Windows itself to applications like Photoshop will offer discounted prices for students just to get them familiar and trained on these systems that require a lifetime of licensing

Just like drug dealers really. :wink:

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