My daughter is angling after a laptop for her ninth birthday later this year. It so happens that we have a spare laptop - a Lenovo Ideapad which my wife bought in order to work from home, before Covid appeared and she was sent home with a beefy PC workstation and two nice monitors. The laptop currently runs Windows 10, and is very unlikely to run Windows 11. In any case, since Windows seems to be little more than a front for advertising these days, I've decided that it will be replaced with a suitable GNU/Linux distribution before she gets her hands on it. I'm a Kubuntu user, but I thought I would investigate Edubuntu by downloading the ISO, firing up a VirtualBox VM, and installing it. These are my notes.
The VM I created has 8G memory, 4 processors, and 20G disk space. The first pleasant surprise is that after the initial "choose your language" page in the installer, the second page offers customisation of accessibility options, split into obvious categories "Seeing", "Hearing", "Typing", "Pointing and clicking" and "Zoom" "Seeing" has options for high contrast, large text, reduce animation and "screen reader". If you toggle "screen reader", it immediately fires up for use in the installer, although sadly the labels for the main categories are not read out which is a little confusing. "Hearing" has a visual alerts option, "Typing" has sticky and slow keys options, "Pointing and clicking" has "mouse keys", and "Zoom" has "desktop zoom" which also takes effect immediately when selected. Good though it is to have accessibility options foregrounded like this, the lack of explanations about each one, and the fact that the form itself doesn't appear to be rendered in a screen-reader-friendly way is unfortunate. I disabled all of the accessibility options and pressed on; they can be changed later in System Settings.
The third page is for selecting keyboard layout which has the usual options, plus the standard "detect" feature and a box to type into to check the layout. The fourth page gives the option for connecting to the internet, and the fifth page gives a choice between installing Edubuntu and trying it out (i.e. running everything from the ISO image). Then I get the choice between an interactive installation and an automated one; I choose interactive.
Then there's a choice of a minimal installation of Edubuntu versus a full-featured one. Since I want to evaluate it, I'm going for the full-featured version.
After that, a choice about installing proprietary software to support bits of hardware, and additional media formats. I say yes to both.
At the "how do you want to install Edubuntu" screen, I opt for the "Erase disk and install Edubuntu". Usual account creation screen, though with an intriguing "use active directory" option which I leave unset. Timezone set, a confirmation page, then I click Install and leave it to do its thing, which turns out to be showing me a slideshow about Edubuntu.
It highlights the "Edubuntu Installer" which allows me to install age-appropriate software. There's a plug for the KDE Education suite, and Tux4kids which I have not previously heard about and will therefore have to investigate. It promises many fonts pre-installed, which should be endless fun. There's something to administer menus, and a page about LibreCAD for technical drawings. Calibre for managing e-Books, GNOME calculator for... erm... doing calculations, LibreOffice, Firefox, Inkscape and Gimp. They mention Accessibility Preferences inside System Settings - given the well-meaning but slightly flawed screen reader handling in the installer, that will also need investigating.
After a while, the installer completes and I can reboot.
It boots, I see my user, I log in. A welcome page pops up offering additional settings. Do I want to share system data with Ubuntu? No I do not (for this test system anyway). And that's it, except for an option to open the App Center
There's some weird glitchiness going on with the display; maybe I should install the VirtualBox guest additions... That seems to have fixed it, and enabled auto screen resizing.
However, when I've tried to launch applications by searching for them, I've had a few "The application Notes has closed unexpectedly" errors, which is unsettling.
The problem involves the command /usr/libexec/bijiben-shell-search-provider, whatever on Earth that is.
This is not inspiring great confidence.
Try Firefox; it does some first-time setup which includes suggestions to install Privacy Badger, Clear URLs and Facebook Containers addons.
There's a dedicated education installer to be found, but it's separate from the system settings. There are options for installing various "bundles" e.g. "ubuntu-edu-preschool" is the "Preschool Educational Application Bundle" I try installing everything out of curiosity.
There's quite a lot of stuff in there, some of which looks quite good, but also much stuff that kind-of works, but could really do with a lot more polish. For example, the tux4kids project has some nice ideas, but the presentation is all a bit basic, and judging from the state of the git repositories, these aren't being updated. The GCompris suite looks better maintained.
I'm also a little dubious about the software choices. For example, the packages on which the ubuntu-edu-primary meta-package depends include Step, an interactive physics simulator including Coulomb and Gravitational forces, and Kalzium, a periodic table of the elements which lists properties such as Electron Affinity and First Ionisation Energy.
Well, obviously it's preferable to Windows. I figure that if she's going to have a laptop, then it is going to have a Linux distribution on it, and I guess Edubuntu seems like an obvious choice, despite the curious software choices and rough edges. I'll try it on the laptop and see if the glitches encountered in the VM manifest themselves.
I feel bad for pointing out the lack of polish, but unfortunately it happens to be true. What I really ought to do is roll up my sleeves, learn some C or C++, check out the relevant code from Github, and try to improve things. Fixing the problems with the screenreader in the installer might be a fun place to start (a quick bit of googling suggests that this Ubuntu Desktop Provision repository is probably relevant).