If the proprietary CAD software is only offered on windows, You could always go with wine and install the application through that. Wine works well with most windows applications, only a few of them like proton drive is a bastard to install.

To clarify, as in setting a 1 billion dollar defense budget to traffic people into their head and tail relays in tor. But no government has had their head further up their ass to do such a batshit crazy thing.

I’ve personally started using KDE plasma shell version of fedora, its as close to being windows (in terms of technical functionality) without actually being windows. On top of this you have the fedora community, and in a time where access of information has gone to shit, you can be rest assured that someone will get to your question or you’ll find an answer to a question you may have on fedora.

I would say I’m fine supporting Microsoft by buying their laptops, I just don’t want it to be surveiled and capitalized off of through spyware in the OS. I suggest going used instead of new, reason being, you can get really good specs that makes the license practically free. My current laptop is a thinkpad E14, the previous owner loaded it with 40 GB of ram and a 1tb ssd with a ryzen 7 7730. I paid $400 for that machine. If you don’t mind going used with slightly older specs, maybe a haircrack or two, the payout is worth it.

I disagree with your first point, when I started learning c++ I wanted to make an integral approximator, an approximator that takes any function and returns the approximate value. I already knew programming through java, and I’m not entirely used to the C++ syntax. Basically what I did to do my programming project that was “fun for me” was rush through the learning process, skipping detail of classes, inheritance, polymorphism, structs, linked lists, pointers and arrays, to get to lamda functions. Eventually I did get to learn c++ formally with my programming class, most of which I don’t remember learning it during the summer. Its not that doing your own projects is bad, you just can’t be overly ambitious on it.

I got a thinkpad E14 off of eBay for $400. There was a slight haircrack in the hinge, but it came with 40gb of ram 1tb ssd and amd ryzen 7730u I believe. I always recommend looking on eBay first, it’s likely you can find a $1000+ laptop for $400 like I did.

Yea, I had a server with a nvidia GPU that was orginially on windows. I went with ubuntu, and the installed nvidia driver (when ubuntu asked to install any drivers) gave a horrendous aspect ratio that didn’t fill up the entire screen. I had to uninstall the driver to get it to work.

Came from windows laptop that I got about a year ago, before then I was running unironically chrome os. I liked chrome os for it’s Linux features. So when I did go from my Chromebook to a windows, it wasn’t as fun. I also didn’t like all the spyware on windows, and this was the time when I was removing myself from the internet as if I didn’t exist, So it was inevitable I would switch.

The only reason why I haven’t switched earlier is because I am a university student (currently in electrical engineering) and I was concerned that I would be given an exotic application that my laptop cannot support on Linux. Then I learned the majority of students have macbooks, so if it doesn’t work for me it doesn’t work for them too. That’s when I made the conscious decision to switch from windows to Linux.

Currently trying out fedora workstation, it is like the Mac os of Linux operating systems (and that’s a compliment).

I’ve been using fedora workstation for about a month now, you really can’t go wrong with it. It’s great for laptop, there are also ways to customize it to work with a desktop. I am running it on amd CPU/GPU, so i don’t know how well it works with nvidia and Intel, I know some distributions do a really poor job managing the drivers. I don’t use CAD, but I have done FPGA design and programming (C/C++) and it works great. Haven’t done much gaming, all I have is minecraft installed, I could imagine you can install steam on there as well. Hope this helps.

I try to avoid it, but ever since search engines have gone to shit, it has forced me to use it for debugging code. Stack overflow, r/Cprogramming, minimal articles on the specific issue, have ceased to exist ever since AI generation. And why should it? Why would a user post an issue (for example, on stack overflow) wait for a few days to get a few responses, when they could get an instant response with AI. Search engines have gone to shit so much, that My fathers startup company has issued a premium license for chatGPT because of how dead Search engines are.

I hate it, I wish I didn’t have to use it, and yet this is my reality.

You seriously can’t go wrong with the lenovo thinkpads on eBay. I Got a thinkpad E14 ryzen 7 (7th gen), 48gb ram, 1tb ssd for $400 on ebay with a small hair crack on the hinge.

At the end of the day, a laptop is a laptop, and the cost difference between a $2000 brand new laptop and a $400 used laptop there really is no argument/justification to be made to buy a $2000 laptop in less-intensive tasks. Here’s a better instance of your money: find a $400 laptop with semi-good performance (ryzen 3 or intel equivalent) put $1600 to a gaming computer and setup a virtual environment with a radeon or rtx gpu at your fingertips.