Having a cold shower at the end is probably number 1 if I made a list of things I do right in life that most people don’t do. I feel so clean and comfortable for ages afterwards, no matter if I’m in my house or the middle of the forest, summer or winter. Best thing my dad ever taught me. (I mean he’s still alive, so technically ‘best so far’, but I’m not holding my breath).

Apparently you don’t live in Scotland (west coast at least). Spring may not be warm, but we get some clear dry days, and if you’re in the sun and out of the wind you can feel the heat. By summer it’s so muggy and humid that 15 degrees (Celsius) feels oppressive. I used to live in Australia but the (not-)heat here feels worse.

I wouldn’t say I’m entrenched, I’m happy to learn new ways of doing things as and when appropriate.

On the other hand, although I would like to migrate to Linux, it’s not one of my top priorities, and it sounds like the drawbacks in compatibility when submitting documents into university systems and working on group projects would outweigh the benefits for now, for me.

But I look forward to working towards never learning what windows 11 is like!

Thanks everyone for all the helpful replies. A lot of people mentioned the office webapps, personally I’ve always detested these. Things like keyboard shortcuts for sub/superscript and support for IEEE referencing were not available as far as I remember, and in general they were more minimal than the desktop version and so slower if you needed to use many features. I think the consensus is I will stick with Windows for my uni work for now, but I can try out onlyoffice, and use a bootable USB to start learning more about Linux for later on down the road. Cheers!

The longer I spend on Lemmy the more tempted I am to give Linux another try (had an old desktop with Ubuntu 10+ years ago, but never really got the hang of it fully, can’t remember the exact details but not everything worked properly).

What holds me back is I’m in the middle of an engineering degree, I need to be able to collaborate easily on documents with word, share folders with OneDrive etc because that’s what everyone uses. Even signing into the uni’s portal-type thing is managed through your MS office account and authenticator app. And also I don’t have a lot of spare time to fiddle around getting things to work and ironing out wrinkles, even if that only needs done one and it’ll be fine in the long run…I need to be able to get on with my work reliably (maybe over Christmas I will have a bit more time to do setting up stuff).

Can anyone convince me ask these worries are unfounded? Can you still easily interact with the MS universe, or are there ways around this?

My poor wee laptop is already full to bursting with MATLAB, stm32 ide, etc so I don’t think I’d be able to partition and dual boot…