> But the students with Windows laptops did not have these kind of problems. Although I can think of a lot of issues, in this "very niche thing" Windows worked "out of the box" and Linux didn't.
Yes, for this very niche thing Windows works out the box. For other not so niche things, Linux works out the box. For the not so niche thing of "set up a LAMP stack" and similar, Windows is pretty poor at it, compared to using apt-get.
Also, for this very niche thing, I'm pretty certain that the arduino IDE I installed from the repository worked out the box for serial port access.
I'm guessing that you pretended the Linux boxes were Windows, and installed on Linux by downloading it off the arduino distribution site?
> I'm guessing that you pretended the Linux boxes were Windows, and installed on Linux by downloading it off the arduino distribution site?
Yes, that was a mistake. But it was not as simple as saying "install from apt-get" because some where using Arch-based distros (pacman), a few were using Fedora (yum) and others Ubuntu. Even so, not always that the user is added to the right group. Also, we wanted to show the new 2.0 IDE.
Yes, for this very niche thing Windows works out the box. For other not so niche things, Linux works out the box. For the not so niche thing of "set up a LAMP stack" and similar, Windows is pretty poor at it, compared to using apt-get.
Also, for this very niche thing, I'm pretty certain that the arduino IDE I installed from the repository worked out the box for serial port access.
I'm guessing that you pretended the Linux boxes were Windows, and installed on Linux by downloading it off the arduino distribution site?