technology

oh yeah that's common as hell. all instructions are for windows because if you're on another OS "you're competent enough to figure it out".

i had to use circuit simulator and PCB design software for some of my courses and they barely run in windows good luck with wine. our OS lab course which was for literally teaching us how to use linux insisted that we use a VM on windows instead.

best part is our university has no available computers for undergraduates to use so everyone must own a laptop (for exams you had to bring your own laptop) and the university was gracious enough to loan a total sum of 76 dollars for a new laptop.

to be fair and balanced an old stolen refurbished ThinkPad (mine had a japanese keyboard I can't image what the poor businessman felt when they stole it) was around 50 dollars otherwise most other electronics have the same price as their retail price in the US + 10-20% for tariffs or smuggling surcharge.

Have you told your instructor?

Set up Podman or Docker, deploy this, install the VPN utility, then bridge the networks.

That way you can route all your traffic though the windows container

Wine, maybe?

Or maybe talk to the Prof and see if you can do something else in lieu of the project.

There's no way to just use university computing resources to do the things that require a windows install? I didn't even own a computer for the first couple of years of my degree (20/21) and just used the resources at school, but my degree is in biology so obviously not quite the same;)

hahaha wow

most VPNs seem to be technically possible to get working on linux if you dig enough to figure out what its doing under the hood (if often unofficially, such as cisco anyconnect) but ymmv

You could also use KVM with virtual machine manager, I absolutely love it. Do you need a microsoft account? There are many ways to skip the account creation portion of the windows installation and just use a local account.

May tux bless your soul comrade

There's quickemu that has MacOS as an option. Your steps are now:

1. Set up quickemu.
2. Create MacOS VM.
3. Install 2FA utility on VM.
4. Open terminal.app and use rsync and ssh because MacOS has them already.

I don't think you have to create a MacOS account (or at least you didn't have to for Catalina), but I also never used quickemu before lol

Maybe there's some kind of solution where you connect to the VPN inside the VM and then bridge that connection back to your host machine/use it as your gateway

not sure if this is still doable but if you just don't give the vm internet access you can bypass needing a microsoft account

VPN on phone and usb tethering?

mint@university:/var/$

You could try windows 10 ltsc iot https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/iot/iot-enterprise/whats-new/windows-10-iot-enterprise-ltsc-2021 ofc its still windows but it should be lighter to run on a VM cos full fat windows and VMs is grim. Years ago when i ran fedora but needed Visual Studio at my first job I'd run win 8 embedded edition or something which managed to truck along nicely on a thinkpad x240 with 2 displays connected.

We use F5 BIG-IP at work for the VPN, it's such garbage software. Like why can't they just have the VPN automatically enabled when it's needed, and configure it using the native built-in VPN support?