burngreave.net

in http://lists.suse.com/archive/suse-linux-e/2005-Jan/4115.html there are some well thought out the difficulties and steps in migrating an educational establishment to a Linux desktop.

"Trinity is looking at a 3 - 4 year migration, we went dual boot with win98 over the summer and ironing out all the major issues with the clients took us through to October, when they start being used for formal lessons within the next few weeks I'm sure a whole load of other issues will crop up as well.

Making the clients look right is also amazingly difficult, slight style differences can cause all kinds of issues, such as single clicking on a directory/folder to open it or clicking on the title bar causing it to shade as opposed to go fullscreen can cause a casual user to get worried. Were using KDE3 with Plastik to give it the windows look, but when I was setting up the desktop due to my years of using CDE or XFCE or similar I put all the launchers on the kicker as opposed to icons on the desktop which threw people initially because they were so used to icons being on the desktop.

The second hardest thing is convincing people that linux != windows in any shape or form, its something completley different, and approaching it with a windows mindset is liable to lead to disaster.

We've also had to factor in time for the teachers to learn not only linux, but the other apps they would be using such as OOo. Theres also a not inconsiderable number of kids who have been using Linux for a few or more years who are practically salivating at the chance of getting one over on teach with their 133t sk1llz, which is yet another thing to factor in and build safeguards against.

Finally there are the kids who have started their GCSE preperations. Its totally unfair on them to expect them to jump to another OS when they have much more important things on their minds. Not to mention that we couldnt find them a suitable database client/tool in time, hopefully those who will be starting their GCSE's in september will be able to use Base in OOo2, so long as OOo2 is finished in time and the relevant teachers can get familar with it. Which means that we'll be able to defenestrate ourselves (should the bosses want that) by the earliest September 2007. "