+1 for Ubiquiti. I’ve got a Dream Machine and 5 camera hooked up, it’s great.

I’ve had Brother laser printers for over 15 years with my Linux machines and they’ve worked beautifully.

+1 for Restic on Backblaze. It’s cheap af for my setup because all my data is on a RAID 10 pool with snapshots. Then anything that needs to be safe from theft/fire/unlikely number of simultaneous failures gets sent to Backblaze.

It’s been a while since I was in college, but I dual booted my laptop with Windows and Fedora for the first couple years then moved exclusively to Fedora. I even wrote my master’s thesis using Libre Office.

Unless you come across arcane statistics software or bullshit “education” tools that only exist for Windows that you need, which is possible, you should be good to go. Even then, you might be able to use Wine or find alternatives.

So yeah, go for it! Keep the Windows VM if you want a safety net.