In 2007, Macedonia implemented a program to put computers in all its schools, and for price and performance reasons, chose Ubuntu as the operating system for the project. This has led to a high level of literacy in Ubuntu and related open source programs not only in schools, but among the country’s population generally.

Aid Worker Daily provides a snapshot of the current level of Ubuntuphilia in Macedonia, and the positive side effects the school migration is having for the entire population.

“A few weeks ago, while my wife was still in Macedonia, I asked her to install Ubuntu on our old laptop which her parents had been using for years, primarily for Skype. The machine had contracted a bug and I am not a fan of bootleg software. With the popularity of Ubuntu it was easy enough to find someone to handle the installation (the neighbor) and within 24 hours she was back up and running. It seems as if everyone in Macedonia keeps a copy of the ISO in their back pocket.”

And then, he blows apart the argument that Linux is hard to use. His father-in-law had never used the laptop before, either running Windows or Linux: “Shortly after returning to the States my wife called her father and asked him if he had a minute so that she could explain to him how to get online. His response was, “Don’t worry about it. I figured it out on my own.”

It has long been my opinion that Ubuntu (and most other modern Linux distros) are more logical and usable than Windows, and here is another anecdotal confirmation of that.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 28th, 2008 at 9:15 am and is filed under Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.