I’d like to never boot into Windows again. I have VirtualBox installed where I can install Windows 11 if I need to but is there anything that it(Windows on a VM) wouldn’t be able to do like accessing hardware devices? Thanks in advance
Depends on your major. I’m a bio/ecology major and a lot of the tools I used were cross platform or web based.
Also the university I went to did have basic Linux instructions for certain things like connecting to printers and connecting to the internet.
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.
Lol same. Eventually (maybe the fifth exam or so) they just stopped caring about me though, and let me use my own laptop with openSUSE. Zero security, I was even hooked up to their WIFI and could easily have cheated… I didn’t though; the only exams where it would have been tempting were hand-written anyway.
It sucks that education institutions care so little for people not using giant corpo microshit though.
It sucks that education institutions care so little for people not using giant corpo microshit though.
Its so bad too.
Our school used ciscovpn for access to the university cluster and web services.
I figured out how to configure openconnect to work properly. And even wrote and hosted documentation for other Linux users to do the same.
However the school had no interest in incorporating my documentation into their VPN help site.
I was studying computer science and at my University in Gothenburg all the lab computers were Linux. We had one course which required Windows because there was one software which never got ported to Linux which we had to use and it was a pain because only one lab room had windows computers and they were constantly booked.
Most probably you’ll be just fine.
What software was that?
It was some custom software for emulating electrical wires and very low level stuff, I don’t remember much more.
If the question is not installing Windows on your own hardware, I’d be willing to say “No problem,” for most circumstances. Not only are campus computers with required software on them, I’m sure you’ve got a testing center available for Windows mandatory exams. Also - I work in a modest community college that has a virtual desktop system available to students at no cost that has Windows and plenty of software titles required by various courses.
I did, Manjaro Linux on a laptop that started on windows 8. I did have meny teacher get upset I was not using the programs they recommend. I did CIT with a minor in web dev and design. It was not always easy but I feel it was worth it when my Uni used proctorio to do testing remote. Protorio is basically a virus or almost a rootkit. I was able to do my testing in-person because I didn’t own a windows or Mac computer.
There are two potential show-stoppers.
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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.
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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.
Even with tests, don’t most universities have library computers or a computer lab that’ll suffice instead of using your personal Linux machine?
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Depends on what you go for. I got my BS and MS entirely with *nix. There are some niche programs for specific majors which did not have alternatives and/or ways to run on *nix, so don’t be disappointed if you can’t find a solution.
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.
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It depends on what you’re studying. Some majors like accounting might require you to use Excel, for example. On the other hand, when I was getting my BS+MS in computer engineering, running Linux was actually advantageous
Accountants use Excel!?
If you can’t run your business out of Excel, you aren’t using Excel correctly.
/SI mean I’m sure it’s possible but surely there are better solutions…?
Not for the price of €12/user/month
Salesforce, ServiceNow, and SAP can never match those prices.
I wasn’t referring to those, I was referring to dedicated accounting software.
€12/user is trivial for any business, much less an accounting business that I’m sure it’s lucrative.
Yes, the price is the point. Excel (Office) is that dirt fucking cheap, industry standard, and comes with a bunch of other shit included that can be legitimate value add for a small business.
If you’re at a firm that has legitimate need for specialized accounting software, you’ll have enough money to get those. But even those generally export to Excel format. Without outing myself too much, I’ve had comsiderable exposure to financial tech over the last decade and less than 10 specialized accounting softwares I’ve seen couldn’t export to Excel. All of those still exported to csv, or “software agnostic excel” if we want to bend things a bit.
The power of being industry standard for going on 30 years now cannot be overstated.
I’m going into a Medical Lab Tech program. I know 1 lab tech but he went to school in the 80’s. So I’m not sure what software they use now.
I don’t know specifically about a medical lab tech program. But I do know about clinical software in general. It is by and large proprietary Widows software. Seems like something you may encounter. But said software could be delivered via Citrix, which does have a Linux client.
Cannot speak for other schools in other countries (and I guess this question was targeted at colleges in USA), but I am currently studying Open informatics at Faculty of Electrical Engineering at Czech technical university in Prague and all the courses I have that are not mathematical, but require to use a computer do take into account that you may not be using only Windows, but also MacOS or Linux. I haven’t yet encounterered a software that we would be required to use and wouldn’t work on Linux, nor did I have to go through any more hassle because I use Linux, but rather contrary to that. In some cases using Linux made things easier and more straightforward for me.
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.
Yes, except online exams. The online spyware they make you install for those is designed not to work on a VM or anything like that. I had to keep a barebones windows partition around just for that.
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.
Last I checked, Pearson doesn’t allow Linux for remote tests, nor will they let you use a VM.
I know there were ways to skirt their VM detection, but is that worth the risk for 10s of thousands of dollars in your education?
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.
don’t most distros use networkmamager anyway?
The official python installer uses wpa_supplicant if it doesn’t find NetworkManager. On my debian I was using wpa_supplicant for eduroam only because it could not “find” NetworkManager on my machine.
