We used Matlab in 3rd year of high school. Teachers sent us link to download pirated version. I installed GNU Octave.

I mean basic programming in general, as basic as it gets. It’s not guaranteed that every student has programming experience.

I use EndeavourOS (which is almost the same as Arch) for gaming and it works great.

You can do .net on Linux but Windows is much better for that. I recommend using Windows for work and Linux for everything else.

I recommend going with Virt-manager, it works much better than VirtualBox in my experience.

Only saw it once in hospital when I went to do first aid exam for driver licence.

My first distro was Ubuntu because it is a beginner distro and it looked interesting.

I use Heroic games launcher for Epic and it supports GOG too.

It works, thanks.

Around 1 and a half years.

I had same problem on Arch based distros, it’s Nvidia problem. Try booting with LTS kernel.

1. I never used Wayland but Xorg works really well.

2. Don’t copy terminal commands from internet if you don’t know what they do. Also, try new things just to try them. That’s how I started using many things that now make the core of my computer experience. Even if something looks scary I recommend giving it a go because in most cases it is much easier than it looks (at least when you have some experience with Linux).

3. YouTube can be a good resource at the start.

4. Switching to Linux was very smooth experience for me because I wanted to inform myself about Linux before switching just to know what I’m getting into. If you go prepared you probably won’t experience many problems.

Problem I have with Flatpak is their way of naming packages which makes them very akward to run in a WM. That’s basically the only reason why I haven’t used Flatpak since I switched to WMs, pacman and AUR also work really well so there isn’t even a reason to use something else.

To be fair, I would see why. Arch isn’t that hard to install anymore so some people see Arch-based distros that are just Arch with GUI installer as useless. I use EndeavourOS just because GUI installer is more convinient to me.

I use dmenu for global search and Nitrogen for wallpaper. In some WM you don’t need additional programs for those two things so I recommend you to first check that for WM you use.

For general tips I recommend looking at configs of other people.

If you have PC that can run virtual machines I recommend starting there so you can see how Linux works. Use it for a longer period of time and try doing some stuff there that you would normally do on Windows.