Open source is becoming a powerful alternative to proprietary software and proof of that is that many municipalities, governments, and companies are now adopting open source solutions, but that is happening in schools and universities as well. The Augustinian College of León in Spain is just such a place.

We are used to seeing big entities like an administration apparatus of an entire city go open source, and Munich is the perfect example. Open source has now become a powerful alternative that can no longer be ignored, and people realize this. Extended support is no longer something available just for proprietary solutions, and feature parity is real.

It's not really a surprise that universities are also switching to open source, even if there is still a lot of inertia from all those years of proprietary software. Surprisingly, one of the biggest hurdles is not a financial one, but a human one. Users don't want to change how they do things on a computer, but most of them don't realize that Linux is not all that different. It's safer and much more stable, but not all that different.

One year of Linux for the Augustinian College of Leon

Fernando Lanero from Augustinian College of León told muylinux.com about their transition from Windows to Ubuntu. They had a lot of work to do, but not with the system itself, but with the rest of the faculty that had a hard time migrating.

Their efforts prevailed, and in the end they moved 120 PCs from Windows to Ubuntu. None of those systems is dual-booting, and all of them run Linux. People got adjusted, the costs of maintaining Windows machines is gone, and teachers and students now get to use Linux everyday.

From the looks of it, the only technical problem was the fact that their Hitachi Whiteboards were not supported by the Linux kernel in Ubuntu 14.04, which shipped with the 3.13 version. They managed to install Linux kernel 3.14 and everything worked as it should.

The transition from Windows to Linux systems is not easy, but it's rewarding. You can find the rest of the story on muylinux.com.