That makes perfect sense, thanks. There are a few reasons why I posted it to HN:
* I had to pick my battles when I was there and this wasn't one of them. I've emailed this to friends who are current students; hopefully something will come of that.
* I wanted to confirm that this wasn't just a UT CS thing. As I expected, there are a bunch of responses attesting to similar experiences at other places in the comments below.
* I was also curious to see the discussion on what people think would be a good way to run the labs (or at all.)
For anyone who wants to take the lead in trying to get things to change at their univs, I hope this post will serve as a confirmation that you're not alone and you should be able to find many other students to join you in pushing for change.
In my experience, the hacker qualities of CS undergrads fall on a pretty broad spectrum. Even if the majority of students have trouble with basic Unix tasks, I'm sure there will be 5% of them who will make excellent admins. And that's more than you need.
There's nothing inherently wrong with fvwm2. I'm sure it was cutting edge back in your day. But it's ridiculously outdated in 2009. You might have learnt to use it, but today's students need to unlearn everything they've learnt. Even if they manage that, it's plain inefficient. By a big margin.
Whatever technology you grew up with, you're bound to think of that as the natural interface. That's exactly the point I was making about the professors.
There was a time when you had to do typesetting by typewriter. There was a time when all cars were stick-shift. There was a time when farmers had to plant seeds manually. That doesn't mean it's a good idea to do any of those things today.
I'm not sure if you were claiming you will learn linux better if you use fvwm2, but that's simply not true.
But that is not the main point I'm making. What you need to understand is that no matter what you, the admins or anyone else might think of fvwm2, it's turning away the students in droves. This needs to be stopped.
* I had to pick my battles when I was there and this wasn't one of them. I've emailed this to friends who are current students; hopefully something will come of that.
* I wanted to confirm that this wasn't just a UT CS thing. As I expected, there are a bunch of responses attesting to similar experiences at other places in the comments below.
* I was also curious to see the discussion on what people think would be a good way to run the labs (or at all.)
For anyone who wants to take the lead in trying to get things to change at their univs, I hope this post will serve as a confirmation that you're not alone and you should be able to find many other students to join you in pushing for change.