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Here I'm republishing an old blog post of mine originally from January 2016. The article has been slightly improved.
Alright, January is already almost over, so there's not much use in wishing my readers a happy new year, right? I wanted to have this month's blog post out much earlier and in fact wanted to write about a completely different topic. But after January 27th it was pretty obvious for me what I'd have to write about - on that day I passed my final exam and now I'm a "Computer Science Expert" by profession. Time to take a look back at the apprenticeship and the status of *nix in German IT training today.
Spoiler: It's Microsoft, Microsoft and again Microsoft. Only then there's one tiny little drop of Linux in the ocean. I had left the (overly colorful) world of Windows in 2008. When I started the apprenticeship, I was determined not to eat humble pie and come crawling back to that. While it was at times a rather tough fight, it was possible to do. And I'm documenting it here because I want to encourage other people to also take this path. The more people take the challenge the easier it will become for everyone. Besides: It is absolutely necessary to blaze the trail for better technology to actually arrive in mainstream business. This is of great importance if we do not want to totally fall behind.
I didn't take the straight way into IT. While I had been hooked with computers since I was a little child, I also found that I had a passion to explain things to others. I gave private lessons after school for many years and after passing the "Abitur" (think of the British A levels) I chose to go to the university to become a teacher.
It took me a very long time of struggle to accept that I could not actually do that for a living. I am in fundamental opposition to how the German school system is being ruined and I could not spend all my work life faithfully serving an employer that I have not even the least bit of respect for.
The situation is as follows: We once had a school system in Germany that aimed at educating young people to be fit for whatever their life holds. The result was people who could stand on their own feet. Today the opposite is true: A lot of people who leave school have no idea how to find their way in life. Playing computer games is the only thing that a lot of young men (and an increasing number of women) actually do. They have not developed any character, they have no passion for anything (and thus no goals in life) and they often haven't learned no empathy at all (and thus keep hurting other people - not even because of bad will but because of total ignorance).
At the same time, stuff taught in school aims purely at making people available as workmen as soon as possible. Sounds contradictory? Sure thing. At the university I enjoyed the benefits of the old system where there was relatively large academic freedom and you were encouraged to take your time to learn things properly, to do some research if you hit topics of interest to you and to take courses from other faculties, etc. And this is pure insanity: All that is largely gone. New students are forced to hasten through their studies thanks to tight requirements (which semester to take which course in - very schoolish, no freedom at all)... In the name of "comparability" we did away with our own academic degrees only to adopt the inferior "master" (as well as the even more inferior "bachelor").
Secondary schools are lowering their standards further and further so that almost anybody can get their A levels and flood the universities. At the same time there are not enough people remaining for other paths of education - and those who are far too often are completely useless to the companies: People who can be described as unreliable at best are of no use at all. I did not want to be part of that madness and so I finally decided to get out and do what I probably should have done right from the start.
The German vocational school system is a bit special: You only go to school one or two days (this varies among semesters). What about the other days? You spend them in a company you apply to before you can start the apprenticeship. That way you get to know the daily work routine right from the start (which is a really good thing). School is meant to teach some general skills and at work you learn practical things.
On the first day I went to vocational school, I kind of felt... displaced. Why? Well, coming back to school as an adult to teach children is something that takes a moment to adjust to. I enjoyed teaching in general (even though there are always horrible classes as well 😉) but becoming a _student_ again afterwards is really strange. At least for a while.
Subject matter was extremely easy for me. But being almost 30 years old when I started the apprenticeship of course meant that I had a lot more of knowledge and experience than the typical 18 or 20 years old student. However this was a good thing for me since I also have a wife, two children and had to drive about 1.5 hours to school and the same distance back. Which meant that I had far less time for homework or learning than the others. In fact I only found a few hours to learn for the preliminary exam as well as for the final exam. But that's it.
We had PCs with Windows XP and were required to work with that. Most of my classmates protested because they were used to Windows 7. I simply installed Cygwin, changed tho panel position to top and things were pretty much ok for me (it's only for a few hours a week, right?). A while later we got new PCs with Windows 8(.1?) and new policies. The later made it impossible for me to use Cygwin. Since I had never touched any version that came after Windows XP, I took my time to take a look at that system. In fact I tried to be open for new things and since a lot of time passed since I left Windows, I no longer had any strong feelings towards it. Still Windows 8 managed to surprise me: It was _even worse_ than I had thought possible...
The UI was just plain laughable. I have no idea how anybody could do some actual work with it using the mouse. Now, I'm a console guy and I need no mouse to do stuff (if I at least have Cygwin that is). But that must have been a joke, right?
Then I found out that Windows _still_ was not capable of even reading an EXT2 file system. Oh my. So I decided to format one USB key to FAT32 for school. But guess what? When I attached it, Windows made some message pop up that it was installing drivers - which then failed... I removed the USB key and inserted it again. Same story. A classmate told me to try another USB connector. I thought that he was fooling me but he insisted on it and so I did it (expecting him to laugh at me any second). To my big surprise this time the driver could be installed! But the story does not end here. No drive icon appeared in the explorer. I removed the USB key again and reattached it once more. Nothing. My classmate took it out yet again and plugged it into the former connector (the one from which installing the driver failed). And this time the drive appeared in the explorer! It was that moment that I realized not too much had changed since XP - despite the even uglier looks (and that, gentlemen, is quite an _accomplishment_!). Bluescreens, program crashes and cryptic error messages that I had not seen in years all were back. Yay.
I realized that I could not work like that and decided to bring a laptop each school day. Just about all my classmates were fine with Windows however. But speaking of classmates: We lost five of them in the first two years. Two simply never showed up again, two more were fired by their companies (due to various misbehavings) and thus could not continue their apprenticeship and the other one had a serious problem with alcohol (being just 17 years old) and was also fired.
My laptop was running Linux Mint. When I bought it, it came with Mint pre-installed. My wife got used to that system and did not like my idea to install a different system (I mainly use Arch Linux as a desktop at work and on other PCs at home) and so Linux Mint stayed on there.
There were a few classmates interested in Linux in general. These quickly became the ones that I spent most of my time in school with. Three already had some experience with Linux but that's it. One of them decided that it was time to switch to Linux about a year ago. I introduced him to Arch and he has been a happy Antergos (an Arch-based distro) user since then. Another classmate was also unhappy with Windows at home. I answered a few questions and helped with the usual little problems and she successfully made the switch and runs Mint now.
Some teachers couldn't quite understand how one could be such a weirdo and not even have one single Windows PC. We were supposed to finish project planning using some Microsoft software (forgot the name of it). I told the teacher that the required software wouldn't run on any of my operating systems. Anything not Windows obviously wasn't thinkable for him and he replied that in that case I'd really have to update! I explained to him that this was not the case since I ran a rolling-release distro which was not just up to date but in fact bleeding edge.
When he understood that I only had Linux at home, he asked me to install Windows in that case. Now I told him that I didn't own any current version of Windows. He rolled his eyes and replied that I could sign up for some Microsoft service ("dream spark" or something?) where each student or apprentice could get it all for free. Then I objected that this would be of no use since I could not install Windows even if I had a license because I did not agree to Microsoft's EULA. For a moment he did not know what to say. Then he asked me to please do it at work then. "Sorry", I replied, "we don't use Windows in the office either.' After that he just walked away saying nothing.
We were required to learn some basics about object-orientated programming - using C#. So I got Mono as well as Monodevelop and initially followed the course.
I got an older laptop for a really cheap price from a classmate and put OpenBSD on there. After having played a bit with that OS in virtual machines I wanted to run it on real hardware and so that seemed to be the perfect chance to do it. I installed OpenBSD with full disk encryption. Everything worked really nice and I even got Monodevelop on there (even though it was an ancient version). So after a week I decided to use that laptop in school because it was much smaller and lighter (14" instead of 18.3"!) - and also cheaper.
After upgrading to OpenBSD 5.6 however, I realized that the Mono package had been updated from 2.10.9p3 to 3.4.0p1 which broke the ancient (2.4.2p3 - from 2011!) version of Monodevelop. Now I had the option of bringing that big Linux laptop again or downgrade OpenBSD to 5.5 again. I decided to go with option 3 and complain about .NET instead. By now the programming course teacher already knew me and I received permission to do the exercises with C++ instead! He just warned me that I'd be mostly on my own in that case and that I'd of course have to write the classroom tests on C# just like everyone else. I could live with that and it worked out really well. Later when we started writing little GUI programs with Winforms I would have been out of luck even on Linux and Mono anyway. So I did these with C++ and the FLTK toolkit.
Around christmas I visited my parents for some days. My mother's computer (a Linux machine I had set up for her) stopped working. As my father decided that he'd replace it with a new Windows box (as that's what he knows), I gave up my OpenBSD laptop. I installed Linux on it again and gave it to my mother as a replacement to prevent her having to re-learn everything on a Windows computer...
So for the last couple of weeks I was back on Linux. However the final exam consists of two parts: A written exam and an oral one. The latter is mostly a presentation of a 35 hour project that we had to do last year. I took the chance and chose a project involving FreeBSD (comparing configuration management tools for use on that particular OS). We also had to hand in a documentation of that project.
Six days before the presentation was to be held, I decided that it would suck to present a FreeBSD project using Linux. So I announced to my wife that I'd install a different OS on it now, did a full backup, inserted a PC-BSD 10.2 CD and rebooted. What then happened is a story of its own... With FreeBSD 10.3 just around the corner I'll wait until that is released and write about my experiences with PC-BSD in a future blog post. Just so much for now: I have PC-BSD installed on the laptop - and that's what I use to write this post.
The presentation also more or less succeeded (had a problem with Libre Office). But the big issue was that I obviously chose a topic that was too much for my examiners. My documentation was "too technical" (!) for them and they would have liked to see "a comparison with other operating systems, like Windows (!)" - which simply was far beyond the scope of my project... I ended up with a medicore mark for the project which is in complete contrast to the final grade of the vocational school (where I missed a perfect average by 0.1).
Ok, I cannot say that this came completely unexpected. I had been warned. Just a few years earlier, another apprentice chose a Linux topic and even failed the final exam! He took action against the examiners and court decided in his favor. His work was reviewed by people with Linux knowledge - and all of a sudden he was no longer failing but in fact got a 1 (German equivalent to an A)! I won't sue anybody since I have passed. Still my conclusion here is that we need more people who dare to bring *nix topics on the list. I would do it again anytime. If you're in the same situation: Please consider it.
Oh, and for another small success: The former classmate who runs Antergos also tried out FreeBSD on his server after I recommended it. He has come to like jails, the ports system and package audit among other things. One new happy *BSD user may not be much. But it's certainly a good thing! Also all of my former classmates now at least know that *BSD exists. I've held presentations about that and mentioned it in many cases. Awareness for *nix systems and what they can do may lead to giving it a try some time in the future.