f00f/eris

It’s nice that major news outlets are saying what we nerds have been screaming for the past two decades. Microsoft only shares a small portion of the blame for the recent outage (they could have built their OS better so software vendors don’t feel the need to use kernel modules, but the rest is on CrowdStrike) but we are too depenent on them.

If my American university has a system in place for students that don’t own Windows, I would not be surprised if yours has a better one :)

LibreOffice has opened every DOC(X) the school has sent me, albeit imperfectly, and all assignments are turned in as PDFs, which I usually make using Markdown and LaTeX. I have had to use Office 365 for collaboration, but only about twice a year, and that runs very smoothly in Firefox. On one occasion I tried to collaborate with CryptPad, but it didn’t work as well as I hoped.

Most computer labs at my uni run Windows 10, rarely 11, but a lot of the science labs run Linux.

The most frustrating thing has been the lockdown browser used for some exams. My university library has computers I can borrow for exams, but yours might not, and they detect VMs, so you might have to dual boot for that.

I don’t have much PC building experience, but these specs seem sufficient. Only comment is that you might need to use a distro with a new-ish kernel and graphics stack, given the very recent CPU and GPU. So not Debian stable, but Fedora, Ubuntu, or any rolling release distro will be fine.

Handbrake will probably still work if you compile it from source, but it seems like upstream isn’t paying much attention to libdvdcss support.

The version in Debian’s repo still works for me, anyway.

I’ve never used these, but I’ve come across them while scrolling through F-Droid and they seem to fit this use case:

Kotatsu
Kinoko

If you haven’t set up this laptop yet, then I’d suggest installing a server-oriented distro like Debian, AlmaLinux, or Ubuntu Server. Those have minimal install options that come without a desktop environment installed, as most servers do not need one. If you’d like to make the install harder for yourself, this might be a good excuse to give Arch Linux or Gentoo a try, as those have the option of a fully manual install. If you’d like, you can install a desktop environment afterwards using the package manager.

If you already have a Linux with a graphical desktop installed, you can configure the system not to automatically start it with sudo systemctl set-default multi-user.target. (Do not do this on your main device!) You can re-enable it with sudo systemctl set-default graphical.target.

Regardless, you can then start a graphical session using startx, or whatever command is more appropriate for your desktop environment (gnome-session to start GNOME on Wayland, startplasma-wayland to start KDE Plasma), or by sudo systemctl starting your login screen manager (sddm, gdm, lightdm, etc).

I have the same problem at my school, but thankfully, the school library has laptops I can borrow with the lockdown browser installed. It isn’t ideal, but is there a similar arrangement you could make?

Unlikely. While in theory someone could create a compatibility layer, it would be quite a challenge, as obviously, kernel modules are very closely tied to the specific kernel. I did some web searches, and only found the same few dead projects (that didn’t completely solve this issue anyway) that you found, and other forum posts that offer little encouragement.

Make sure you have the latest version of Windows 10 or 11, and the latest drivers for your network hardware. If you do, then there’s probably not much you can do about this.

Debian Stable, in my experience, can stay online for months, even over a year, with very little attention, and still work as well as you left it. You can also install RHEL or a rebuild, like AlmaLinux, RockyLinux, or Oracle Linux, as a workstation distro.

As for the device, my use case is fairly different so I’m not sure what to suggest. Maybe an Intel NUC, or a Framework laptop.