Unless I misunderstand your question, draw.io can be downloaded as a standalone Linux application and run locally.

Likewise, the Xfig package should he available in most Linux repos. It’s old, but good enough for a quick sketch.

edit: aha. My mistake. My eyes slid over ‘open source’ in the title*, and even still I hadn’t realized it was an Apache license.

* Whaaat, it was pre-coffee? Let the purest among us cast the first stone.

Oh, goddammit.

Oh, I just make them. 😁

Sure, or melted Velveeta

It ain’t wrong if it makes your taste buds happy!

I love disco fries & poutine, but its not an everyday thing for me. (Disco fries are like an American version of poutine with beef gravy & yellow American cheese instead of cheese curds)

I make a dipping sauce from ketchup & mayo and will variously embellish it with things like mustard/dill relish/sriracha or worcestershire/garlic/oregano/lemon juice

I also make a “buffalo ranch seasoning” with cayenne, garlic, vinegar powder and powdered ranch dressing.

Cheese & bacon bits with sour cream is another favorite.

It’s possible I’m mistaken on Flatpack vs. Snap. I don’t use either of them, myself.

In the appropriate topology projection, all beans are orbs

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.

Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) is a solid pick. All the perks and integration of Mint, without Ubuntu.

…Ubuntu which, yes, is a Debian downstream. People have their opinions on it. It works. It has its nuisances, but it works.

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.

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.

Good luck!

Secure file transfers frequently trade off some performance for their crypto. You can’t have it both ways. (Well, you can but you’d need hardware crypto offload or end to end MACSEC, where both are more exotic use cases)

rsync is basically a copy command with a lot of knobs and stream optimization. It also happens to be able to invoke SSH to pipeline encrypted data over the network at the cost of using ssh for encrypting the stream.

Your other two options are faster because of write-behind caching in to protocol and transfer in the clear-- you don’t bog down the stream with crypto overhead, but you’re also exposing your payload

File managers are probably the slowest of your options because they’re a feature of the DE, and there are more layers of calls between your client and the data stream. Plus, it’s probably leveraging one of NFS, Samba or SSHFS anyway.

I believe “rsync -e ssh” is going to be your best over all case for secure, fast, and xattrs. SCP might be a close second. SSHFS is a userland application, and might suffer some penalties for it

The Nickelback catalog. Most of Creed’s too.

That implies the earth is round which might alienate some voters from that base.

Although… It might attract the “I’m a sekrit alean” bloc…

We should shop this, maybe do a tabletop…

And the reality is modern medical science has made 60 the new 50.

Which kinda works. because modern education has made 20 the new 14.

/s
//class wars are awesome!

“I like people who obey the law of gravity.”

I do this. A Debian Live image and an encrypted LVM for home. Came in handy a few times for the odd system rescue

Misinfo!

That is a professional grade fleshlight with the liner removed for sanitizing.

Unbound will take updates via API. You could either write exit hooks on your clients, or use the “on commit” event on isc-dhcp-server to construct parameters and execute a script when a new lease is handed out.