MakisH

My use case was to create a bootable Live USB with some software already preinstalled, which people can try in a course, without having to install anything on their computer. While for long-term courses, students can prepare and install everything, I am also offering such a course in a conference, where people are most likely just going to pop-up into the room.

Maintained and works like a charm in 2023 (e.g., for Ubuntu 22.04), the documentation and interface is great, the maintainer is very responsive and helpful.

I understand your point, and I had to argue on it a lot when introducing such changes. I think the answer is struggling for the right task, but again with some guidance. If the learning outcome is to learn to program, then I don't see why you should waste half a semester trying to figure out by yourself the technicalities that could help you go beyond a hello world. Similarly, I don't believe we should (nowadays) force people to write everything in the terminal using Vim. The additional cognitive load is too distracting that it prevents you from digging deeper.

One can say "but that's how I learned, and I am fine and shine today". This is probably true, but then I believe that such a person had the right background to anyway learn by themselves. I see our mission as teachers to help the students that actually need the help, rather than letting them give up too early, in favor of some kind of excellence evolution. And I believe that if we prepare the right groundwork (explaining all the ropes before we start pulling them), then even the more advanced students will be able to learn even more that they would by themselves in a more struggling environment.

In a C++ course we teach at the Technical University of Munich (for students coming from a non-CS background), this is pretty much the direction we have recently steered the curriculum. It is amazing how we were always expected to "just figure out" all these very important practical aspects by ourselves as students, while these are so complicated for C++. In combination with a lot of outdated material out there, students end up feeling lost and giving up, or going through a lot of pain to develop even simple projects.