Sounds like you need to familiarise yourself with PowerShell and Group Policy.

Vbox will create a bridge with my wifi card (I’m a laptop user with no option for a wired nic in the host).

I’ve never been able to get kvm to do that and haven’t found any working instructions online that a simpleton like me can follow

You can always try the ‘Contact’ form on the site, it’s not likely anyone here is going to be able to give you good advice

So what is your suggestion for a viable alternative that auditors will also accept?

I’m surprised that no one has commented on the Mastodon post’s author recommending people ‘use a privacy concious browser like Chrome’. What a way to invalidate her arguments

I don’t have a better answer for OP, but telling them to switch distros is also not answering their question at all.

I would highly recommend against installing a pirated version of Windows like BearOfATime suggests (at least via the second link he provided) - it could cause trouble for both you and your school.

There’s a docker image already that makes it easy to deploy and use, no compiling required.

Have you checked out Stirling-PDF?

This is why I prefer using Distrobox on my personal computer. No package for Signal-Desktop? No problem, run it through a Debian container using Distrobox.

You don’t mention what services yiu plan to utilize and the limits are different for each.

Another community will take its place one day, so no real value will be lost.

Sounds like it’s better for you to ask now so you can decline the job if they’re a Windows only shop.

The day Discord dies will be a massive loss for the internet.

What loss will that be? Discord’s value is the same as MSN Messenger - the history on Discord is already unusable for resolving issues, so when it’s gone people will just move to the next real-time communication platform that fills the same gap. It’s not a forum that people can search and find answers on years after discussions have happened and solutions have been posted.

One thing I would recommend is using a note taking app to create snippets of fixes or personalization changes for your OS that you’ve made. For me that includes things like how to add my laptop’s webcam to the blacklist and other things that I’d need to spend time looking up since I don’t do them that often.

This is one of the reasons I’m using OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It’s been a solid distro for me.

While mailspring looks nice, the requirement to create a mail spring ID to use it does not appear to be optional which is off-putting.

Do you download ISOs directly on your phone? If not, lots of clients have web interfaces that make it trivial to manage from any device with a browser.

The recommendation to use a reputable email provider host is much better, but if you want to go it yourself the Google Cloud free tier includes an instance with a public IP address. Snapshots are not included in the free tier or any other backup, so use at your own risk - this besides the complexity of email security.

Not at all nitpicky. "it’s faster and more secure’. Well, how? There’s no details provided to support the claims. My banana is both more secure, faster and juicier than yours. Don’t I need evidence to support that statement? Or is that enough for you to accept it?