Debian User Forums

Shall I add my modest contribution to this otherwise splendid discussion.
About the BSD, FreeBSD is not always the best choice. It is good for server where hardware is not exotic. It's also the only BSD who have nvidia attention and receive their proprietary driver.
For laptops (thinkpad above everything else) with no nvidia, OpenBSD seems to be the best choice.
I don't know the rest. I wouldn't recommend PCBSD, what is hard in FreeBSD is also hard in PCBSD.

It's not clear what you want to do with those laptops. A locked workstation or a computer your students can tinker with? Do you want the students to learn the mainstream stuff (linux), grow a unixy knowledge with a more concise system (OBSD have easy conf files, wonderful doc).
Are you trying to prevent the breaking up of Debian with laptops-equipped students?

Sounds to me you're installing Linux on a wide variety of hardware brands, some of which may be lean on resources. And that those who get these machines will be looking for support, either from you or directly from the user groups.

I believe you want a distro that is widely in use, with a friendly, well-established support base for those without a lot of technical knowledge.

May I suggest Ubuntu.

Caitlin

Caitlin wrote: I believe you want a distro that is widely in use, with a friendly, well-established support base for those without a lot of technical knowledge.

May I suggest Ubuntu.

I once installed Ubuntu on an elderly friend's laptop and it gave nothing but trouble; I got fed up with his "support" telephone calls. Once I'd installed a stable Debian DE on it, the calls ceased.
I've installed Debian on quite a few computers which are in use by non-technical users who do not stray from typical desktop use; for example, I installed, configured and now periodically update my father's system over the network, via ssh.
Running a desktop system, once initial configuration and software installation has been carried out, is a piece of cake, There is absolutely no reason why any knowledge of systems administration —beyond a few elementary things— should be acquired by the kind of users referred to @userprofile. In my workplace we have the Mate Desktop environment on 5 computers which are all used by users whose only experience is Windows.
A Debian desktop—which is poles apart from a Debian server requiring considerable technical expertise—can be run by anyone.
If you are going to recondition old laptops, then consider pre-installing Debian as, for instance @debian.org/distrib:

Buy a computer with Debian pre-installed

There are a number of advantages to this:

•You don't have to install Debian.
•The installation is pre-configured to match the hardware.
•The vendor may provide technical support.

+1 on kedaha's reply. Ubuntu might make installing some 3rd party software that isn't found in the repos easier, but in the long run, I'd also rather install Debian/Devuan on a newbie's system, just because the support questions will be fewer, unless you haven't made sure that all initial manual setup work has been done.

Debian is especially great for systems that are just installed and not constantly tinkered with. And if you don't go crazy on backports and 3rd party stuff, upgrades are smooth sailing -- moreso than on Ubuntu. Add to that the fact that Debian more clearly separates ethically challenged software.

Seems to be nothing about the OP now.

...Wandering? Wandered?...

Might get locked.

arochester wrote:Seems to be nothing about the OP now.

...Wandering? Wandered?...

Might get locked.

Rather than locking it, better just to mark it as [SOLVED] since, wandering back to the OP

/tmp wrote:With that being said is it better to work within the system of Debian GNU/Linux or pour efforts into a fork like Devuan?

It's entirely up to /tmp to choose whether "to work within the system of Debian GNU/Linux or pour efforts into a fork like Devuan" but if he chooses the latter, then this is not the right forum for further discussion of his project.
But is wandering offtopic offtopic in offtopic?