Nonviolent protests work fine, great even, they just have to be disruptive. The Civil Rights movement was largely nonviolent and got results because they striked, took up commercial space so commerce couldn’t operate, and gummed up the works so productivity stalls. The suits won’t care about violence either if they have ways of escaping, they only care about direct impacts, be it directed violence or economic harm.
I think machine compatibility plays a huge role, some machines do mostly ‘just work’ while others are a pain. It also definitely requires some tinkering, though mostly on setup or on the first week or two in my experience.
Also, ymmv and a lot of people swear by them but I’ve never had good luck with Ubuntu based distro, they’ve always been super buggy with hard to track fixes for me. I like fedora a lot better and it similarly has decent (though not nearly as extensive) community support for weird bugs, but I know people swear by many things.
Depends what the grade structure is like, in my one college CS class homework could probably have been GPT’d (didn’t exist yet) but tests were 75% of your grade and were handwritten in a proctored hall. Mostly they involved pseudocode and showing knowledge of data structures and algorithms rather than specific coding requirements. That couldn’t be GPT’d, at least not with competent proctors and a time limit, so you couldn’t pass without some competence even if the specific coding syntax went over your head.