I love how no matter how much the market makes it explicitly clear that an idea is absolutely terrible, Microsoft will just be like, “we’re doing it anyway, fuck you.” The best argument for Linux is just to gesture vaguely at Windows.

The cheapest one I know of is about $8 a month, so it should be affordable, even on a tight budget.

You can buy a super cheap cloud VM and use a (self hosted) VPN so it can access your own PC and a reverse proxy to forward all incoming requests to your own PC behind your school’s network.

It’s arguable whether this would violate their policy, since you are technically hosting something, but not accessible on the internet from their IP. So if you wanna be safe, don’t do this, otherwise, that could help you get started.

Yay Jellyfin! What an awesome app!

New life lesson: never volunteer for a for-profit company.