i’ve been doing cs for a year now with a coreboot’d t440p. if anything, it’s gotten me some greetz from my profs, lmao

i’ve made do with libreoffice just fine, i submit most of my labs in odt without issue

keep a VM for labs in case they require windows, on machine or a home server. pick your poison

I did, and that was a while ago. However, I would say that it would depend on what your degree is on. I had to do a lot of writing so it was fine for 99.99% of the time.

At one point all my assignments were handed in PDF format. A practice that I still do today as a professional. If you must hand in via Word, you may have some issues unless you run MS-Office somewhere. As there is always the risk of minor formatting issues.

For those rare times, maybe use their library or comp. Lab.

deleted by creator

For my classes, certain ones required Visual Studios, but for the most part, you can just run that in a VM (or use JetBrains substitutes if you can). However, if you’re doing game design or development, a VM might not preform well unless you have a GPU passthrough setup.

I went to collage back in the early to mid '10s completed my first year on ubuntu before switching to a 50/50 edubuntu/WIndows drive. Some stuff just required exact windows tools and my department head wouldn’t allow the gnu alternatives as the course work had instructions for windows 7 programs and was already drawing up win 8 plans for next semester too. But writing reports and learning basics was easy enough with the educational ububtu spin.

Software engineering in Canada in the 2000s. Most of the labs in my university ran Linux, at least in the engineering, math, and science areas of campus.

Personally I ran, depending on the year, LFS (Linux from Scratch), Slackware, or Gentoo (which still lives on that laptop today but also it hasn’t been booted or connected to a network in like 10 years).

I think there was only one lab with Windows. We also had a lab of Solaris machines but I bet those are gone now.

No idea what Law, Nursing, and other faculties in the other side of campus used.

I’ve been using it since high school. Never looked back. The only thing that bothers is annoying professors using privative software. But don’t let them define your freedom. Work around “those specific cases” rather than suffering windows just for them.

You pretty much need networkmanager for eduroam. If you are a wpa_supplicant enthusiast you need to swallow your pride. Otherwise no issues with using linux for higher education.

Learning Latex for your dissertation will make referencing easier, as an aside.

If you don’t mind using the computer labs (are those even still a thing? when did I get so old that I wonder if commonplace things when I was in college still exist?) or a vm for assignments where the professors require the use of MS software. Which is likely just the intro computer class they use to make sure the kinesiology majors know how to use office.

Of course, there’s also learning management software which is universally broken, so I wouldn’t be surprised if some of it still required IE6.

I did.

However I had to borrow one if the schools Windows computer for final exams because the anticheat spyware didn’t run on Linux.

Currently studying Computer Engineering. I did manage to get most stuff working without needing Windows.

It came usually at the cost of extra work, but I’d say it was worth it. So far I even got to writing makefiles for C++ projects targetting some Atmel chip (Microchip Studio is Windows only). And in some cases I even found better tools than what they privided us with.

Unless you need some very very specific program or run into some wierd constrains you will be fine.

There are two potential show-stoppers.

1. Field-specific apps that only run on windows. If you really need Adobe Creative Cloud or SolidWorks or something like that you might be out of luck. This is mostly true for apps that require GPU acceleration, which is difficult to rig up in a VM. You wouldn’t want to do that if it was a big part of your workload.

2. Mandatory spyware and rootkit DRM to prevent cheating with remote tests. Hopefully if they do such a thing they provide loaner hardware too. I’ve seen a lot of bullshit in my time but my experience is outdated, so I don’t know what’s common nowadays.

There are workarounds to almost every issue you may have. You can run Windows in a VM for software that requires it, or dual boot. M$ Office can be ran in a browser now. There is no reason to buy a license, just DL windows10 direct from M$ and never register, all they do is lock you out of some display options and add a watermark to your desktop.

wine should handle most things not in a browser. in a browser you can switch the user agent or run edge/chrome if needed. ultimately its going to vary by school, class, and instructor if one requires something that won’t run in wine. In my experience these almost do not exist because mac is very popular in academia. I mean if you take a photoshop or ms office course or such you may be expecting a bit much.

I rocked Linux when doing my CS degree. It was great, and I felt I had a much better learning outcome than my peers. It will depend on requirements from your uni. I had some trouble with my school’s printers (but so did those running Windows sometimes), but we had a web interface we could use. And in one class the lecturer decided that we needed to use Visual Studio. We could use Rider instead but got no support from the lecturer, so I had to figure out some stuff myself. But it was a good learning process.

A lot of stuff was much easier for me to do than my peers. Especially terminal stuff, Docker and other stuff where they often used WSL or VMs. As where I had native tools