School computers are riddled with spyware & proprietary software, the fact that they use windows is bad enough, but then you are forced to use edge or chrome and other proprietary software and often you are blocked from installing open source alternatives like librewolf or duck duck go may be blocked.
What I am asking is, how can we get around this, do i just need to bring my own laptop using FOSS privacy respecting software. or is there another way around this. Thanks for the help.
Bring a USB with a bootable Linux distro on it.
The university I go to locked down the BIOS on my laptop so you can’t boot any other operating system that isn’t the Windows 10 that it came with. I own the laptop, very annoying.
Yeah it doesn’t sound like you own it anymore.
I’m planning to get rid of the lock as soon as I graduate. The only reason I haven’t done it yet is because I’m worried that doing so would break some of the bizarre black-box proprietary software that we’re required to have.
Did you buy it through them?
I was required to rent a laptop as part of my enrollment there. At the 2-year mark we were given the option to trade in our old laptop and rent a new one or buy it outright, and I chose to buy it because it was working fine.