>I've taken some classes where teacher gave us an image where everything was already installed and configured.
My department tries this occasionally. It fails because students either have
a) cheap pieces of shit with unreasonably poor performance under virtualization (I'm talking multiple seconds to bring a different window to foreground under Ubuntu)
b) Retina MBPs, on which Linux has absolute garbage text rendering due to quarter-assed (half-assed is giving it too much credit) per-application support for high-DPI displays. Staring at code for hours is hard enough when the code isn't blurry.
The department runs a Linux lab in one of the libraries with professionally maintained Ubuntu installs that already have everything professors request for their courses, and provides SSH access to those machines.
An interesting side effect is that you either get good at configuring your environment for yourself (to use your own Mac or Linux machine) or you learn to work with just a terminal (use Emacs/Vim and Bash over SSH).
My department tries this occasionally. It fails because students either have
a) cheap pieces of shit with unreasonably poor performance under virtualization (I'm talking multiple seconds to bring a different window to foreground under Ubuntu)
b) Retina MBPs, on which Linux has absolute garbage text rendering due to quarter-assed (half-assed is giving it too much credit) per-application support for high-DPI displays. Staring at code for hours is hard enough when the code isn't blurry.
The department runs a Linux lab in one of the libraries with professionally maintained Ubuntu installs that already have everything professors request for their courses, and provides SSH access to those machines.
An interesting side effect is that you either get good at configuring your environment for yourself (to use your own Mac or Linux machine) or you learn to work with just a terminal (use Emacs/Vim and Bash over SSH).