While I agree that someone like Sanders would be a better candidate, it would require him (as an example) to have the full support of the Democratic party. And he certainly does not have that, as seen previously when he was running as a Democrat and the Democrats fought him harder than they've ever fought a Republican.
Harris is the only realistic non-republican candidate on the table, and so far she's doing way better than Biden did and would have done. Biden certainly would have lost this election, Harris has a decent chance of winning. A Democrat Sanders would have lost due to constant sabotage by the Democrats and the Democratic aligned media outlets. An independent Sanders would also have lost, and split the vote for a Republican win.
When I studied at the uni 5 years ago we only collaborated over Google Docs. I'd strongly recommend online collaboration over sending files back and forth. For most things I ran Linux, and booted into Windows when there was a particular need for it, which wasn't often. But it all depends on what software you're expected to run during your studies. If you have room on your drive maybe having a minimal Windows install along side Linux could be a good thing?
Also, I'd recommend a distro that comes out of the box with working BTRFS snapshots. The last thing you want is have the machine you rely on for school shit the bed due to a bad update or something you do, and you have to learn how to repair Linux in the middle of an assignment that's due tomorrow. With snapshots you can just roll back to before it shat the bed.
Not only a bigger market share. What's keeping Firefox alive is the financial support they get from Google. If enough people move from Chrome to Firefox without Firefox also securing finances from elsewhere, Google could easily kill Firefox by just not giving them money and we'd all be left with just Chromium.
I'll just revert to .IFF