I’ve done online education both as a student and as an instructor of adults. The truth is that it doesn’t come close to matching an in-person classroom experience.

As an instructor it is really hard for me to create engaging lessons even in person. I get a lot of blank stares and zoning out. That may be partly on me but I think it’s because a lot of students are just there because they’re required to be there. They aren’t interested in what I am teaching even if I’m excited about it. At least in the classroom I can give them gentle nudges to engage and there is some live interaction to encourage them.

If I have to teach the course online it is likely to be very hands-off. The general format is read some content, watch some videos, do some homework and maybe a quiz, and engage in some forced online interaction. At the place where I was learning, that interaction was one response to a prompt, posted on a student forum, and two responses to other students’ posts. Those posts had a mandatory minimum word count requirement to meet the grading requirement. There is sometimes interaction with the instructor on the forum if they are very motivated and aren’t too busy, but most instructors are adjuncts and probably have other work they are doing. Some are, like students, not motivated and are just there to do the minimum to get paid. Also, group projects are difficult to manage. There are no in-class labs, and in some situations an online simulation does not come even close to a hands-on learning experience.

We have done live online classes where I teach but we have very small class sizes and it tends to work better since we can encourage interaction with each student. This isn’t possible with larger classes and again, there is no social incentive if students are all sitting alone staring at their phones/tablets/laptops.

So from my experience online education tends to be isolating for students and not at all motivating. It is also a surprising amount of work for the instructors and does not tend to add value to the course.

You make a very good point. I’m probably overthinking this. I actually use Plasma as my DE but have done some additional configuration and sometimes get frustrated at the number of options, and the difficulty of finding how to change them, for literally everything.

That’s good to know and I’m happy you’ve had success moving users. Keep up the good work.

I think converting users to Linux tends to face three major issues:

• A historical reputation for being hard to configure and use, even though that is generally no longer the case with mainstream distros.

• Fear of the command line.

• Decision paralysis due to the sheer number of options available for things like distro and desktop environment, and the fact that there are as many opinions as there are users. I’m an obvious example of this.

Technical people like me tend, I think, to appreciate the flexibility. Normals just want something that works immediately and without any fuss.

That would depend on how directory and clipboard sharing are configured. There are some potential problems if the user is looking to share files between the VM and the host.

Unfortunately that uses the Plasma desktop which looks similar but is much more complicated to (re)configure and less like Windows. It might drive a switcher away through frustration.

Ubuntu Linux is the most popular distribution but it uses the Gnome desktop by default, which many Windows users may find to be a stumbling block since it looks and acts nothing like the Windows desktop. The standard distribution of Linux Mint uses the Cinnamon desktop, which is much closer in look and feel to Windows, and it is based on Ubuntu so most users can benefit from the technical support of the Ubuntu community.

[Edit: corrected “Linux” to “Ubuntu Linux.” thanks [email protected].]

A virtual machine running Windows will act exactly like a bare metal machine, with all the telemetry and advertising and such.