Let the students run their own machines? Considering the difficulty of the entry-level classes (weed out) and the fact that students often have 3-4 extra class

Let the students run their own machines? Considering the difficulty of the entry-level classes (weed out) and the fact that students often have 3-4 extra classes just like it, having them spend hours upon hours of admin work. They're training to be computer scientists not admins. My school runs RHEL/gnome on some beefy quad-core machines. Whatever is needed for a class is installed immediately and just works. No need to spend hours hunting down packages and installing them, and then no need for the professors/TAs to spend hours upon hours of duplicating configurations in order to make sure that everything can be graded. Students will acquire enough Unix knowledge throughout their 4 years by using a well-maintained system. Most of them spend about 10-20 hrs/week using it for development -- no need to add another 30 for sysadmin work.