While I agree with you that most people who run Linux as a daily driver might be capable of running Windows as a secondary OS on occasion, this discounts the fact that he or she would be required to purchase the license (else break the law), and also ignores the fact that they should not be required to do so

Recent versions of Windows have made it a lot harder to install through USB. A month ago I tried to install Windows 10 onto an old laptop SSD mounted in an enclosure and connected through USB so I could play a games with my brother online that was only available through the Windows store, but the installer literally refused to install to it because I was using the Home edition of Windows instead of Enterprise. I eventually found a solution through some freemium backup software that allowed copying an installation on a regular hard drive onto a USB, but weirdly the first software I tried that claimed to have this feature did not yield in the SSD being bootable, so I had to find something else that was able to do it properly. Given that Microsoft went out of their way to disable doing this directly in their installer, I wouldn't be too surprised if it the workarounds continue to become more difficult or even impossible without paying for the Enterprise version (which is not something students should ever have to pay for).

step one: purchase windows

honestly, I think the question was more of "what should the educators do?" not "what should the student do?

> If you'd ever done homework or study at all, you don't only have Linux.

Speak for yourself; at my school, even the class that used C# worked with mono.

> several of the applications we worked with throughout the course were distributed as Windows binaries

Because most linux users use their distribution's packages and it is normally easier than hunting for windows binaries.

Need an assembler? `sudo apt-get install nasm`, etc. I am a math/cs undergrad and have not used a windows machine in over 6 years. (In my case it would be editing either editing my home.nix or creating a shell.nix for a course rather than apt/dnf/etc)

I never need to use Windows or MacOS for any of my classes in college (although I initially did for the first few months of freshman year before I first started using Linux). For some classes, the students using MacOS or Windows actually had to jump through more hoops; one class required us to ssh into the school's Linux server for some assignments, which required Windows users to download extra software due to not having an ssh client by default (at least, not back then; I'm not sure if powershell has one now), and in another, we had to use Xilinx, a proprietary IDE for writing Verilog to design circuits for FPGAs, which only had builds for Linux and Windows, not MacOS. For the latter one, the TAs literally distributed flash drives with an Ubuntu VirtualBox instance for the Mac users (who comprised the majority of CS students at my university).

Your experience does not match mine at all. I earned a CS degree with a computer that only had Linux installed and I never missed Windows.

> If you'd ever done homework or study at all, you don't only have Linux.

If something applies to your low quality university it does not mean that it applies everywhere.