This is honestly quite reasonable from the university. They will be putting in a lot of work to get something set up that’s strong enough for all the students, and messing that up is kind of a dick move.
I mean my AirPods are fantastic. I think they’re great at playing my podcasts and I’ve not had any problems with random disconnects. Granted I’ve only ever used them with my phone but still.
Also: should you wish for something with Fedora literally in the name, Fedora Silverblue and Fedora Kionite are the upstream—published by the Fedora Project—versions of Bluefin that use GNOME and KDE, respectively.
Either could be an excellent choice should you wish for
Atomic
The whole system is updated in one go, and an update will not apply if anything goes wrong, meaning you will always have a working computer.
Only thing I might add would be potentially Bluefin. It is Fedora with Gnome, except Atomic. It markets itself as:
The best of both worlds: the reliability and ease of use of a Chromebook, with the power of a GNOME desktop.
It’s been fantastic for me with automatic updates and everything installed through flathub so you don’t bork your system with any misconfigured installs.
We got out cheap at about $25… we had a smaller (100 person) wedding, went budget on the food, had a DJ, cake, etc. (basically just what the OP said), and we were still hand crafting stuff to reduce the cost. Shit is fucking expensive.
De-Googling was what got me started as well. Wanted to be able to have my own Google Drive clone with Nextcloud. From there it was just one little improvement / additional service at a time as I learned to use Linux and docker. Now I run a Linux laptop and am considering an android phone.
You could do a manual push mower! I’ve been looking to get one, I hear they’re much better for your lawn health and certainly help with getting a workout of it.
Similarly, nearly everything made by H-E-B / Central Market. Save for maybe one or two things where I’ve been disappointed, I like and even prefer their store brand for many things.
Could not unsee it once I did. I’m glad 35 other completely sane and rational people saw it as well.