I ran Arch on a convertible laptop around 2006-2010. Most notes I did using OpenOffice Writer, with hotkeys to quickly add formulas. Drawings were done with the pen. Homework (where speed didn’t matter as much but where I wanted high quality) were done in ConTeXt.
Programming was done in FreePascal using Lazarus IDE or Java using Netbeans IDE, depending on the course and my personal preference.
I think I had no complaints from anyone. Quite the contrary, one professor even gifted me a book as a thanks for the high quality typesetting in my homeworks, since most students didn’t give a shit and had no fucking clue how to really use their beloved MS Word.
I made it through college without using windows on any of my personal machines, but I did need to access a library or computer lab to take 1 test that needed a specialized web browser for some reason. Other than that, I was actually pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to slip by with a good PDF viewer, libreoffice, and Inkscape.
My degree was in computer engineering, most groups I worked in outside of the engineering department just preferred collaboration through office online or google docs.
Heck, I ran Linux on my college computers back in the 90s. It was just a thing you did. Ah, memories…
Anyhoo, it largely depends on the school but for most intents and purposes Windows, Mac and Linux are interoperable. By that I mean they can generally open, manipulate and share all of the common document formats natively, with some minor caveats.
Many schools also have access to Microsoft O365, which makes the MS Office online suite available as well. All you really need to use that is a web browser.
I work in an office environment these days where Windows, Mac and Linux are all well supported and are in broad use. I use Linux (Debian) exclusively, my one coworker is all-windows and a third is all-mac. Our boss uses Windows on the desktop, but also uses a Macbook. We are able to collaborate and exchange data without many problems.
I would say the two main challenges you’re liable to face will be when Word files include forms or other uncommon formatting structures. LibreOffice is generally able to deal with them, but may mangle some fonts & formatting. Its not common but it does happen.
The other main challenge could be required courseware-- specialized software used in a curriculum for teaching-- and proctor software for when you’re taking exams online. Those might require Windows or Mac
If it ever comes up, Windows will run in a Virtual Machine (VM) just fine. VirtualBox by Oracle is generally free for individual use, and is relatively easy to start up. Your laptop will probably come with Windows pre-installed, so you could just nuke it, install Linux, install VirtualBox, and then install Windows as a VM using the license that came with your laptop. You’d need to ask an academic advisor at the school if that’s acceptable for whatever proctor software they use.
I recommend against dual-booting a Windows environment if you can avoid it. Linux & Windows are uneasy roommates, and will occasionally wipe out the other’s boot loader. It’s not terribly difficult to recover, but there is a risk that could (will) happen at the WORST possible moment. However, it might be unavoidable if they use proctor software that requires windows on bare metal. Again, you’d have to ask the school.
Your laptop will probably come with Windows pre-installed, so you could just nuke it, install Linux, install VirtualBox, and then install Windows as a VM using the license that came with your laptop.
Would you suggest I buy a computer with Windows pre-installed, or a DIY-edition computer (like Framework) with no OS pre-installed?
Oh, shoot. If you’re gonna roll your own then that’s probably the better play because at least then the firmware won’t be all locked down and you can pick known-compatible parts. Get it with no OS and sort it out later if you need to.
It’s easy enough to buy a Windows license key later on if you need it. The school night even make it available you at a student discount. Boot it from a USB drive, even.
The main thing that determines if a computer can be repaired is parts availability. Those three have great parts availability almost universally.
If you wanna run macOS you need a Mac. The t480 is a good recommendation for thinkpads, but don’t worry about ssds or ram yet, just get the one with the processor and display you want (it’s the midrange 8th gen ones). I don’t know the dell world enough to make a recommendation but someone will do so.
Use the gentoo and arch wikis to check what problems people have out of the box with whatever model you’re looking at.
People will say you need amd. This is either paranoid or based on recent events. Neither apply to you.
People will say to get a framework or some equivalent. They’re expensive and a moral/ethical statement. This doesn’t apply to you.
For the office part: Libreoffice formats differently than MS office so there may be problems, but you could also use Onlyoffice (Foss) or WPS office (free but proprietary) which have supposedly 100% compatibility. You could also use MS office web which is free
@RmDebArc_5@clark , I know MS Office can open and save ODFs, I am not sure how well it does it. One would pressume that it being an open document format (hence the name) and it being a NATO standard, MS office would have proper compatibility, but I am rather reserved to confidently pressume this.
Last time I tried MS office is worse at opening odfs than Libreoffice is at opening docx created in MS office, but you can save as doc from Libreoffice which also has problems, but way less
Worth noting that Norway has a very small population, in fact, short term residencies leaving such as students, refugees (which Norway takes an insane amount of), and seasonal (especially oil) workers could at least explain the trend/fluctuation. Overall high usage is cool though! Norway also had a fuckton of government money going into tech startups so maybe that’s impacting it too.
MS Office works oob on Crossover and could work on Wine with a bit of tinkering. Research if your college uses examination software. If they do you are either forced to either using Windows / Mac or gambling your academic carrier via running the software on Wine.
It is pretty good actually. I can install every programming language compiler/interpreter in Linux and everything just work fine.
LibereOffice should work fine if you work on it and export it to pdf. If you want to bounce between LiberOffice and msoffice then don’t expect things to go smoothly.
Any other things to keep in mind when solely using Linux for your studies Go for a stable distro like Debian, don’t install bleeding edge distro like Arch or Gentoo unless you really want to.
I haven’t used either, just curious; what kind of difference is there between regular Ubuntu based Mint and LMDE? I thought it was mostly just more recent packages with the Ubuntu base?
Functionally they’re no different. LMDE draws its packages from Debian (probably stable) repos while mainline Mint draws from Ubuntu’s. So yes, Mint will have overall newer packages than LMDE but it’s generally rare for that to affect your ability to get work done unless some new feature you were waiting for gets introduced.
Ubuntu is the Enterprise fork of Debian backed by Canonical, and as such have contributed some controversy into the ecosystem.
Ubuntu leverages Snap packages which are considered ‘bloaty’ and ‘slow’ by a plurality of people with opinions on these matters. They work. Mint incorporates the Snap store into their package management. You might just need to turn it on in the settings.
With mainline Mint you get new base OS packages with Ububtu’s release cycle, and the Snap store.
In the case of LMDE then, you can run a stable base OS on Debian’s rock-solid foundation, their release cycle, and still get your fresh software from the Snap store.
IMO, they’re the same for like 85% of use cases. I find I end up going to extra measures to disable certain Ubuntu-isms on my own systems that run it, effectively reverting it to Debian by another name.
As a student and occasional gamer, the trade off is having a stable base for your learning needs, and still be able to get the latest user desktop apps from Snap.
There = over there, that place, rather than here. Also, “There will be time. There are no peaches now. There, there… don’t worry.”
Their = in the possession of them, belonging to them.
They’re = they are.
“They’re going to take their business to the store over there; across the street. There will be no other choice.”
Ummm, good luck. When I tried to use Linux on a new machine I built and had a bunch of problems, people on the forums told me to wait six months for someone to write drivers for the components.
LOL. Got totally down voted for simply explaining what happened. Glad it worked for you. It didn’t work for me. This was probably 10 years ago. I made a dual boot system and the internet simply wouldn’t work in Linux, so I had to keep booting into Windows, research, then switch to Linux to implement. Lather, rinse, repeat.
If Windows 11 is as bad as they say, guess I’ll be experimenting with it again.
I think a 650 W PSU should be enough for a workload of 490 W idle. Please, correct me, if I am wrong.
You mean 490W under load, right? One would hope that your computer uses less than 100W idle, otherwise it’s going to get toasty in your room :) I would say this depends on how much cheaper a 650W PSU is, and how likely it is you’ll upgrade your GPU. It really sucks saving up for a ridiculously expensive new GPU and then realizing you also need to fork out an additional €150 to replace your fully functional PSU. On the other hand, going from 650W to 850W might double the cost of the PSU, and it would be a waste of money if you don’t buy a high end GPU in the future. For PSU, check out cultists.network/140/psu-tier-list/ .If you’re buying a decent quality unit I wouldn’t worry about efficiency loss from running at a lower % of its rated max W, I doubt it’s going to be enough to be noticeable on your power bill.
I’ve always had Nvidia GPUs and they’ve worked great for me, though I’ve stayed with X11 and never bothered with Wayland. If you’re conscious about power usage, many cards can be power limited + overclocked to compensate. For example I could limit my old RTX3080 to 200W (it draws up to 350W with stock settings) and with some clock speed adjustments I would only lose about 10% fps in games, which isn’t really noticeable if you’re still hitting 120+ fps. My current RTX3090 can’t go below 300W (stock is 370W) without significant performance loss though.
If you have any interest in running AI stuff, especially LLM (text generation / chat), then get as much VRAM as you possibly can. Unfortunately I discovered local LLMs just after buying the 3080, which was great for games, and realized that 12GB VRAM is not that much. CUDA (i.e. Nvidia GPUs) is still dominant in AI, but ROCm (AMD) is getting more support so you might be able to run some things at least.
Another mistake I made when speccing my PC was to buy 2*16GB RAM. It sounded like a lot at the time, but once again when dealing with LLMs there are models which are larger than 32GB that I would like to run with partial offloading (splitting work between GPU and CPU, though usually quite slow). Turns out that DDR5 is quite unstable, and I don’t know if it’s my motherboard or the Ryzen CPU which is to blame, but I can’t just add 2 more RAM. I.e. there are 4 slots, but it would run at 3800MHz instead of the 6200Mhz that the individual sticks are rated for. Don’t know if Intel mobos can run 4x DDR5 sticks at full speed.
And a piece general advice, in case this isn’t common knowledge at this point; Be wary when trying to find buying advice using search engines. Most of the time it’ll only give you low quality “reviews” which are written only to convince readers to click on their affiliate links :( There are still a few sites which actually test the components and not just AI generate articles. Personally I look for tier lists compiled by users (Like this one for mobos), and when it comes to reviews I tend to trust those which get very technical with component analyses, measurements and multiple benchmarks.
Keeping an eye on this distro for over a year, I really hope this will be something innovative. But it is still very early, so lets see what the years to come will bring.
I am plasma here is why: Customizable: you don’t need a million extension (forgot name) to theme your desktop it’s all in plasma Less buggy: tracker3 on Gnome is soo problematic it will just randomly break/ from what i heard online it will consume so much resources and some apps will refuse to run (idk if me problem) Has alot of qol features
oooo. niri is a good one. I’ve had it installed on my fedora system for… Hell I don’t even know how long but I just haven’t been using it. I’ve really been wanting to use NixOS for a while but haven’t had the motivation/determination to sit down and learn it.
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