I mean, the author explains this and it makes perfect sense. Starting a class with "OK guys, wipe your entire OS on your personal device" is a total nonstarter.
Yeah WSL exists, but that's adding a whole new layer of complexity and indirection and leaves developers without any ability to program natively for the most popular consumer OS around.
Well... I'm not a teacher BUT I was a student and I have lectured some courses about IT to different age cohort and well, I exactly told "you need a system with easy replaceable storage, we start with GNU/Linux", I spent the initial time to help anyone set up, providing some iron to some who can't, than start showing the system for simple things. And it worked even if these days most people have no knowledge even to install system software often asking for "web version, it's simpler".
Touching the complexity and the sorry state of IT things is VERY good in didactic terms. It teach an important lesson to start changing the mindset.
That's great and I support that approach too. I can understand why a career teacher might be less inclined to doing that though. Not saying anyone should be, but I can understand why some wouldn't accept "install Linux" as a viable demand.
I can understand as well: most teachers simply do not want to face a big load of potential issues and have not enough time to train their students enough so instead of teaching for their courses they'll have to replicate "The Missing Semester" (MIT) or even much more basic and time consuming knowledge.
But the fact is that IT in our society is our social nervous system and to be Citizen we must know that enough to operate alone, being not so easy tricked by some PR etc. Obviously most citizens have definitively not enough knowledge in that field but desktops today are books and libraries of yesterday. We can't have a modern culture without the modern tools of knowledge.
Knowing them is like being able to write with pen and paper before and as we can't progress in schools without knowing how to read and write so we can't in modern world progress without knowing to use a desktop properly. That's is. All the tentative to "lower the barrier" have created more issues than those they try to resolve. It's about time to admit it and correct the aim because as a society we are heading to a disaster fueled by some big tech interests exactly because of the ignorance of most.
Yeah WSL exists, but that's adding a whole new layer of complexity and indirection and leaves developers without any ability to program natively for the most popular consumer OS around.