Hi,
I will be writing petition to my government (Poland) to try to get them to ban Windows at schools. I believe it should be illegal to force children to use systems that are paid and use children’s data for AI and advertising.
Maybe you will do it as well? Let’s end this insane practice.
As long as 90% of businesses use it on their desktop it makes sense to teach. Using windows and the common software (photoshop, excel etc.) on it is basically a life skill at this point in time.
I agree with your premise though.
I guess it could be argued the computer proficiency skill is transferable (from Linux at school to Windows at work) as long as there is a significant overlap in the available software, desktop presentation, workflow and control conventions.
One example where it for sure doesn’t work is gimp to photoshop. If you wanna know why, go dig out instructions for how to draw a circle in each one. Or try recreating one of the many effects from PS in GEGL. - The workflow is so fundamentally different that if you know one software, it will actually hinder you learning the other, because your intuition will mislead you and you’ll be constantly frustrated (which actively hinders learning. There are studies on that)
It’s interesting to hear Photoshop and GIMP have diverged so much! I haven’t used Photoshop in 20 years but when I initially made the switch it was pretty simple. I guess photo processing has changed a lot in that time, eh? 😅
No idea where are you from but in Poland there is no way someone teaches these programs at schools. We teach gimp on windows so no problem here.
I went to school in germany, we had a generic computer class for a semester, where we started with basic controls left, right mouse click, middle click to close apps, tripple click to select a row of text, f2 for rename, f10 create new folder, deleting files, installing and uninstalling software etc.
And even here Linux diverges. Middle click pastes your clipboard and only rarely do apps like pdf viewers support tripple clicking.
Later we learned photoshop, word, excel, powerpoint, internet explorer and how to use the powerful features in google search, like quotes, +, -, site: etc. And I must say, it proved to be extrenely useful. I constantly see people around me struggle with those tasks and I’m thankful for my school teaching me.
I moved all my PCs to Linux ~5 years after graduating and it sure was a long grindy struggle of frustration and accepting bad compromises. I tried using gimp for university assignments and it was a huge PITA. Touched a mac for a week and it was equally full of friction to learn and work with.
What I want to say is - I’m sure the re-learning is a similar struggle in either direction. So if you want to prepare students for the real life, it makes sense to learn the software they will most likely encounter in their real worklife. I’m sure most polish design companies use photoshop and illustrator on windows or mac systems instead of gimp and those school students will have a harder time getting into it.