“Upgrade”
LOL
Damn! If only we had some sort of technology that was OS independent and served as a way to view content and run code written for it without having to recompile for every platform.
I am of course talking about web browsers. Which I’m betting this screenshot is from.
Use Librewolf or a plugin that masks your user agent for privacy purposes; hides your OS so you can’t be fingerprinted so easily.
For the record, my friend (he uses arch btw) has used Pearson before and I dont believe it actually affected him, so to me the message means “it could work for you but we won’t support Linux if something screws up on your end because we’re lazy developers”
NO! YOU FUCKING UPGRADE!
if it’s in a browser fake ur user agent
There s a place where you can name and shame in a permanent searchable record: https://wiki.rossmanngroup.com/wiki/Main_Page
Be the change you want.
I had that problem. I changed my ua to Edge on Windows, and the message went away. Everything worked.
Holy shit, why even implement the message then? There is no good answer.
Netflix does the same thing with “supported browsers.” It doesn’t matter if it’s actually supported, just whether it’s one of the two or three it allows because it can do analytics or whatever with them.
Huh, would that work for remote proctors?
No because that requires installing a rootkit on your machine as part of their anti-cheat system.
“Upgrade”? Every other option is a downgrade. Sue them for false advertisement.
Very loose interpretation of the word “upgrade” they’re employing here…
I assume it is a generic message, let’s say youd run windows 7. Then this message would sound more reasonable.
But I agree, this is crazy if it is running in a browser
I’ll just change my web browser’s user agent then; you’re a fucking website, you don’t need to know which OS I’m using.
It’s amazing how many “unsupported” web apps work perfectly fine once you change the UA. It’s often a completely arbitrary limitation so that they can hire less qualified support staff.
and so they can use browser
vulnerabilitiesfeatures to collect more data on youNope we don’t want to hire anyone who knows anything about Linux, no one uses Linux
“Linux is unsupported”, that’ll work
Everyone: uses a UA switcher
“See? No one uses Linux, 100% of users are on Windows or MacOS”
A small publisher’s ebook platform recently started blocking firefox for me, did a bit of digging and found that if pages aren’t requested with the right headers (which work in chrome and msedge) it will respond with a 302, suggesting you go to another page which takes a few minutes and then times out.
This is probably to stop scraping, and could be because I started testing some scraping scripts on it.
Anyway, this hasn’t even stopped me scraping, I just copied the headers and use those in my script.
I use this extension by a Firefox dev
I also use it, but it doesn’t work in this case. Thats why I said headers instead of just user agent.
I had this problem over 10 years ago. change your user-agent, problem solved.
they do it because they are regulations for educational software that must be met, like specific access requirements in order to be used in accredited courses.
it’s not anything specifically against Linux, it’s that they can’t test and validate those access requirements for anything outside Windows due to organizational limitations.
source: I worked for colleges early in my career that used Pearson then worked for a vendor that managed infrastructure and project management for Pearson. they aren’t unique, their competition is just as fucked as they are. most still use waterfall because upper mgmt is old and refuses to adapt.
My bank does this too. I also just change the user agent to switch and it works with no issues.
At this point it just seems silly that they even want to go out of their way to Prohibit Linux users
“Upgrading” to a supported operating system… “Upgrading”.
Yeah, that was also what got into my nerves.
Their deliberate word choice of “upgrade” to supported operating system is mildly infuriating.
They probably assume you are running something like Windows 7
Uhh
Your operating system, Linux, is not supported…
Right, but that could still be given dynamically by a library as “one of the unsupported ones”, getOSName(). They still might not have hard-coded “Linux is bad”.
I’d like to interject for a moment…
Wow, I laughed far too much after reading this comment. Thank you kind stranger.
They know which operating system you use based on the user agent, so they know it’s Linux.
Which will be “If not Windows 11 or Mac os then report os string”. I don’t think they specifically took the time to research different OS’s and list them.
They’re probably using a third party library to do user agent detection. I doubt anyone ever tested their code on Linux in the first place. They’re probably writing code like “if Windows version >= 10 or macOS version >= 10.14 or Android version > 10 or iOS version > 14” and Linux just happens to fall through because it has none of those versions.
Captain, what should we do? She’s not on the list.
The program has the information, but that doesn’t mean the people that wrote the code felt it was worth their time to make the “upgrade” text inclusive to Linux, if they even considered the possibility of Linux.
If they were using user agents for identification, Android browsers on “Desktop mode” would be wrongly identified as “Linux”. Even Discord has this issue on their download page. “Premium” Android devices with large screens use Desktop mode by default
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we have wildly different definitions for “mildly”!
The funny thing is that their server is probably running on Linux.
they aren’t all. vast majority is Windows Server and IBM.
edit: because people seem confused. I’m talking about Pearson directly, not global OS stats.
chill tf out Linux weebs. I’m one of you.
Windows has a laughable market share when it comes to webservers.
I’m talking specifics, not globally.
Nearly all of my daughters sites she visited in college were nix servers. The exception being one administration machine she used for her payroll access as a RA.
By “nix” do you actually mean Nix, or do you mean “*nix” as any Unix derivative?
Guess.
Edit: ;) I guess you are all guessing poorly. Nix when I looked it up is just another fringe linix distro. Never heard of it because I don’t need a purpose built crippled distro for anything. Since a guess is too hard to do I will tell you even now most websites I access according to my router stats are Linix distros. Every now and then there will be a bsd based one and ever rarer than that a windows site. I’m seeing these downvotes as a function of bias against the norm. I find it funny and responses like this always bring a smile to my face.
Lol what? Linux servers are still dominant in market share.
Pearson directly, not globally.
That makes more sense. Thank you for the context.
Guess what most IBM big irons are running nowadays?
Unix
Well, AIX (one of IBMs UNIX variants) is old, and, AFAIK more or less legacy stuff. The other is RHEL, which is s Linux.
The world runs on legacy
Dust? (but really its not Linux or windows anyway)
RHEL, since they bought red hat.
z/OS
For closed and proprietary stuff, and things that still run on FORTRAN and COBOL, yes. But about anything running a web frontend, it’s Linux (RHEL).
AIX (Unix), Windows, Powervm?
Windows? On a mainframe? Microsoft may be ambicious, but that is a few number to big for them.
