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
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 did a bachelor of videogame programming in Belgium 99% on Linux (minus exams), but it was definitely a huge struggle. All the courses and assignments were Windows-only, and 90%-ish required Visual Studio (non-Code) and Windows-only libraries like DirectX or Win32. I got by writing my own tooling to auto-convert these to CMake projects and convincing each teacher to allow me to hand in CMake projects. I wrote SDL backends for most of the win32 assignments, falling back on clang’s excellent cross-compiling for stuff that requires e.g Windows.h. I wrote a blog post about this: https://blog.allpurposem.at/adventures-cross-compiling-a-windows-game-engine And using e.g DirectX natively on Linux, easier than expected: https://blog.allpurposem.at/directx
I also wrote a small wiki on my general experience + a summary of courses and main problems encountered… Windows was non-negotiable during exams: https://dae-linux.allpurposem.at/ I maintain tools, converted assignments, and information on this for future students who want to attempt something like me, but it’s hard to recommend the Linux challenge if you are totally new to programming!
Hope some of this is helpful!
Admirable dedication to the cause
Honestly, great teachers would have given you extra credit for that work (and possibly used it for future semesters, but let’s not get carried away here).
Thanks. I’ve successfully “upstreamed” some of my patches to some courses, but sadly still most of the education is Visual Studio-based. It’s good to see more people in the new years contacting me after asking teachers about Linux and being given my name for help, but of course I want this to be a base part of the curriculum!
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
Unviable for economics and finance in my experience. Excel is absolutely mandatory for these
Can’t use libreOffice and translate the Q code into whatever language libreCalc uses?
At work and in tests you’ll be using bloomberg terminals, risk software, etc only available on Windows, so why bother?
Through the web?
Maybe with hypervisors? A windows VM for excel
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.
Yeah you usually can. LibreOffice works fine for most things. Some classes need things like Solid works that only run on Windows, and the remote testing software can be a nightmare. You might get an O365 license as part of your enrollment but doubt you really need it.
Protip; learn how to typeset your papers in something like LyX and integrate Zotero for citation management. The typesetting usually got me a few extra points alone.
Learning proper typesetting is a great skill anyway, so do it! And yea, I can vouch for the extra credit 👍
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.
What are you studying? Windows VM should be able to handle any programs linux can’t run.
Depends on your major, I guess.
My university’s CS program basically required GNU+Linux (as I’ve recently took to calling it). It was great actually.
Hopefully you don’t have to use Photoshop, anon.
i’d just like to interject for a moment
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.
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.
I mean you can always use the web version of office for 'free" with a Microsoft account. There’s a 100% chance your paper gets used to train AI but still
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I got through University running Debian testing. It was mostly fine, some Linux based subjects were way easier without dealing with a VM (they recommended against WSL for some reason).
However there were a couple units that absolutely required you to use Visual Studio (non-code), I occasionally used a VM, the Uni IT also provided me with a remote VM (there’s a form to fill and and it’s all automated). But I mostly used Rider, which for one unit it confused their CI and I got marked down for (otherwise got top marks so it’s fine).
For office, it didn’t matter. Group projects mostly used Google Docs, occasionally Microsoft Office where the online version worked fine. All my units wanted PDFs at the end anyway, so it does not matter that you used LibreOffice or whatever. Some units provided you with DOCX templates, I had no issues opening them with LibreOffice.
Edit: People are mentioning online exams, my Uni did ‘online quizzes’ which worked fine, and some had to be done in class on their PCs anyway. Final exams where always done on paper.
Depends on your course
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.
