bravemonkey

Sounds like you need to familiarise yourself with PowerShell and Group Policy.

Vbox will create a bridge with my wifi card (I'm a laptop user with no option for a wired nic in the host).

I've never been able to get kvm to do that and haven't found any working instructions online that a simpleton like me can follow

You can always try the 'Contact' form on the site, it's not likely anyone here is going to be able to give you good advice

So what is your suggestion for a viable alternative that auditors will also accept?

I’m surprised that no one has commented on the Mastodon post’s author recommending people ‘use a privacy concious browser like Chrome’. What a way to invalidate her arguments

I don't have a better answer for OP, but telling them to switch distros is also not answering their question at all.

I would highly recommend against installing a pirated version of Windows like BearOfATime suggests (at least via the second link he provided) - it could cause trouble for both you and your school.

There's a docker image already that makes it easy to deploy and use, no compiling required.

Have you checked out Stirling-PDF?

This is why I prefer using Distrobox on my personal computer. No package for Signal-Desktop? No problem, run it through a Debian container using Distrobox.

Love their ‘terms of service’ and complete lack of privacy policy (at least for me, the link is not showing any policy). Whoever pays for this nonsense gets what they deserve.

I don’t think it’s comparable to Amazon Linux even, it’s more infrastructure oriented. From the Wikipedia page:

CBL-Mariner is being developed by the Linux Systems Group at Microsoft for its edge network services and as part of its cloud infrastructure.[5] The company uses it as the base Linux for containers in the Azure Stack HCI implementation of Azure Kubernetes Service

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CBL-Mariner