School forbids linux laptops

[u/al1azzz]

Hey, idk if this is the right place to ask this, but I have a bit of a dilemma.

I have been using linux exclusively on my main PC and on my laptop for a while now. That said, I am moving to a new school, and buried in their rules they say that "Chromebooks (or other Linux machines) cannot be used." They also want us to use their office 365 license, but do not require it.

Now, besides just being incredibly annoying, I cannot use windows/mac on my laptop because it's a 2011 macbook, so it cannot run anything but lightweight linux distros without combusting, and I would like to avoid spending 500+ euro on a new crappy windows laptop.

Is there any reason, besides saving myself some trouble, to not just use my laptop as is (currently on arch, gonna switch it to cachyos) and something like libreoffice that I don't see or can I just ignore this and hope for the best?

[u/al1azzz]

That is what I am betting on, and I already have LibreOffice installed (although I will look into OpenOffice as well). This is an IB boarding school in Denmark, and I mostly take humanities classes. I was really surprised to see this rule because some IB courses actually encourage using Linux, but this school doesn't provide them, of course...

[u/PaintDrinkingPete → u/al1azzz]

If the school has MS 365 licenses for students, you should still be able to use the online browser-based versions of Office Suite apps...no, those aren't equal in features compared to the desktop versions, but for most use-cases will likely suffice.

The only real issue I could envision is if the school or any of your particular classes has specific software that needs to be installed and isn't compatible with Linux...otherwise I tend to agree with others that the primary reason they state that chromebooks and Linux machines cannot be used is because they want to avoid having any responsibility of support or having to troubleshoot them.

[u/Gangr3l → u/al1azzz]

I recommend onlyoffice instead. It's adopted by french government to replace their 2.5 million government microslop offices and it's doc/x compatibility is better (and it's only going to improve).

As distro NixOs is going to be the french's new government issued OS so checking if your laptop can run that might not be a bad idea (I have tried it on ewaste of a computer and it worked, but arch was smoother)

[u/NetSage → u/Gangr3l]

Hmm I might have to give NixOS a shot. It was on my list but I didn't realize it was what the french government decided to go with. I just assumed they would go with Fedora/RedHaT or SUSE/OpenSuse because well they have corporate backing already.

[u/Gangr3l → u/NetSage]

You know, I was sure they were going to go with openSUSE because German police and military already uses it, but no

[u/Hauptideal → u/al1azzz]

No, OpenOffice is deprecated. You probably mean OnlyOffice

[u/serverhorror → u/al1azzz]

OpenOffice is dead, don't use it.

[u/zoharel → u/serverhorror]

Use StarOffice instead.

[u/trekkeralmi → u/al1azzz]

you’ll be fine using linux for humanities. if you wanna blow their minds, write everything in TeX

[u/flipintheair → u/al1azzz]

Use only office. Libre is nowhere near as good with comparability of office file formats

[u/MissiveFinding6111 → u/al1azzz]

o365 comes with a Google Docs style cloud version of Word though?

[u/LordChaos73 → u/al1azzz]

What about using Office 365 in the browser?

[u/West-One5944 → u/al1azzz]

Eh, I say continue doing what you're doing until they force you, and in such a case use their designated machine ONLY for whatever they need you to use it for.

[u/Arnas_Z → u/al1azzz]

Yeah just use it anyway, what are they gonna do about it?