IT professionals with a decade of experience routinely fuck up their own environments and struggle to fix it. Asking IT staff to walk thorough “fixing up” a borked Linux env (for example because some kid is half following some tutorial to get some weird thing working and in the process breaking repos) is a major ask.
Having said that… yeah what I meant really is “have an easy way to reset it all”. This is what home directory partitions and the like are for, of course!
And schools are not in the business of teaching kids how to install an OS to a laptop. There are real things to do in the world.
Imagine being a kid who does not care about computers. You are now being asked to install an OS so you can use some word processor. What?
Interested kids should have good outlets and ways to experiment (like these tech interns fixing the busted computers!), but really the point of giving kids computers is not to get them learning sysops
One time I got a bee in my bonnet about cross-grading my Ubuntu system from 32-bit to 64-bit. I blame Chris Siebenmann for linking me to the HOWTO article.
Cross-grading is not for the faint of heart. It's the worst I've ever messed up any system, personal or at work. All kinds of things broke in novel ways, and it took me about 2 weeks to put it together again, which was a miraculous event in itself. I rejoiced when X and KDE were able to start again.
And that's the price I paid to have an up-to-date system without reformatting.
Having said that… yeah what I meant really is “have an easy way to reset it all”. This is what home directory partitions and the like are for, of course!
And schools are not in the business of teaching kids how to install an OS to a laptop. There are real things to do in the world.
Imagine being a kid who does not care about computers. You are now being asked to install an OS so you can use some word processor. What?
Interested kids should have good outlets and ways to experiment (like these tech interns fixing the busted computers!), but really the point of giving kids computers is not to get them learning sysops