Drive past any secondary school in the UK and you’ll see an institution that is struggling. No: this is not a column about academic standards, dumbing down, bureaucracy, Ofsted or any of the other obsessions of the Daily Mail.

In fact, many of these struggling schools are academically excellent. What they are having difficulty with is something much more mundane than teaching or learning. They are trying - and failing - to manage their IT systems.

Read more of Lesson number one: get rid of Microsoft.

This is often a difficult conversation to have with people given that Windows holds more than the lion’s share of the market. The commonly held belief is that children as well as those new to computing should be afforded the opportunity to learn on the dominant OS because if they do not it is likely that they will fall behind their peers. The hard fact is that nearly everyone who uses a computer as a desktop appliance will be interacting with a GUI: Point and Click, Drag and Drop. A Mac user can get productive on a Windows machine as easily as a Windows user gets productive on a Linux machine and vice-versa. The true disadvantage is not providing people with the opportunity to use computers at all.

The other argument for using Windows and associated applications is that it is Professional Software and that the OSS equivalents are somewhat lacking. This is not necessarily true by any stretch of the imagination; one thing that I have discovered about OSS is that the community is often far more responsive to software related issues, ranging from bug-fixes to security patches, than most private endeavors. However, like everything else in this world it is colored in shades of gray.

In the case of schools, with budgets shrinking and inflation making it difficult to maintain status quo there is a need for alternate solutions. OSS is one such route. Licensing on professional Linux distros are far less than Windows as well as offers greater flexibility to the school in configuring the network to meet their needs. The added bonus of lowered licensing costs is that the savings can be used to preserve existing programs and maybe resurrect those canceled or create new ones. Schools should be allowed to focus on teaching, not making sure that they are licensed appropriately for MS Office.

Following its installation on my sisters laptop, interest in Ubuntu among family members reached an all time high. This past week I installed it on my wife’s and my father’s laptops and my mother is expressing interest in making the switch as well as two of my wife’s friends. Granted this means that I’ll be administrating more computers however if the success of the Sis’ Laptop is any indication it’ll be less admin work and a little more answering general questions, which in the long run will become less as they get more and more comfortable. Now just need to get my co-worker to make the switch.