I recommend Linux Mint (21.2), which a based on Ubuntu (22.04) and Debian. The cinnamon desktop environment it comes with is pretty similar to windows 7, which makes it easier to use. I think 21.2 will remain supported until 2027 as LTS.

It’s not super difficult to host your own gitlab instance tbh.

Not directly related but RISC-V is also really nice to to program with. I hope it takes off because it has fewer niche instructions that may slow down a system (x86 sucks in that regard).

Lmao my university also uses centos 7 for their ancient-ass SSH server. Even the professors just told us to use a VM because they didn’t want to use an old version of clang anymore.

Yeah gcc and mingw took ages back when I learned cpp a few years ago. This was back in high school when I barely knew what Linux was, so it never occurred to me that I could do that. Eventually gave up on setting it up in VScode and used codeblocks and spent the semester dealing with that GUI.