Our first year consists of a pretty intense dive into programming, with many assignments for which we provide starter material. And for that we want all students to run a predictable environment. Also, dual booting helps some students to cleanly separate course work from gaming. :-)

A few students (those whose laptops we could not convince to run Linux) work within a VM, but that experience is comparatively miserable.

You should try some cloud development environments - could give people a completely predictable environment.

This, Microsoft needs to identify this institution for eradication.