I teach my physics undergraduates the basics of latex for writing. They usually figure it out. It’s basically like writing some code. The biggest pain are graphs. And like a lot of code these days, chatgpt can help a lot.

If you just need to write basic text formatted using apa, you could find or create a template and give it to your students. Then they won’t even need to think about the formatting cause the template will deal with it all correctly.

Oh, i should add, in that screenshot, most of that code creates the fornatting. Once that is set, your actual content with words and paragraphs looks mostly like text.

Start with a minimal preamble and start testing it out.

I’m a college professor. I’m very aware of textbook prices. Most students don’t read the textbook anyway, even if its something you want them to read everyday.

For intro classes, I use openstax, which are available free online. For upper-level classes, I try to pick non major publishers, ie not pearson or cengage, with much more reasonably priced books.

My version of this meme would be the prof begging the students to actually read the book he/she picked out that is free or cheap so that they are prepared for class and the students rolling their eyes and instead just going to chatgpt or chegg…

Super old show called scrapheap challenge or junkyard wars, which depends on whether it’s the british or american version. I loved this show as a kid.

Should we put bets on how long until chatgpt responds to anything with:

Great question, before i give you a response, let me show you this great video for a new product you’ll definitely want to check out!

Linux mint or fedora are great options. I’d probably recommend mint as usually geared more to those switching from windows and the forums and communities might be more helpful for beginners.

I’d avoid ubuntu these days. While not horrendous, i’ve run into enough annoyances with their snap package manager that there’s just no reason to learn this additional thing for a beginner.

Just ducks.

I was employed at this awesome little school but left before Desantis’s stupid anti-woke and DEI crusade. I hope it and the current students/employees don’t suffer too much. I doubt Desantis gets voted out…

“Sailing is like standing in a cold shower ripping up $100 bills.”

I had a sailboat for a bit when I lived in Vegas. I absolutely loved sailing. I had a relatively small, cheap boat which was fine for lake mead. It was still expensive though. Everything continuously breaks on a boat.

If I hadnt gotten my dream job in Colorado I would have wanted to live near the ocean and own a sailboat.

Kvaesitso is fantastic. Can get it on fdroid.

Board games at a local game store. Many will have a board game night.

Yeah there’s definitely a learning curve. A little coding experience makes the task easier. I typically give my students a template that they put their own text into that includes a peer-reviewed journal format and an example equation, table, and figure.

There’s still the “not so short introduction to latex” out there that helped me learn the basics back in the day.

Physics professor here. I tell my students that i will give them unlimited help and assistance if they want to learn latex. I find that most students prefer latex once they get the hang of it.

I’m incredibly biased though. There is rarely a situation that I would prefer to use word over latex.

Or just don’t use a figure or table environment. Those are what specify it as a float. If you really must have that image or table at some specific location, just do a center environment with a captionof from the caption package.

This latex “annoyance” is unwarranted as figure/table environments are specifically telling latex that this location doesn’t need to be precisely here and please place it somewhere that will look better. The problem is that when people google “how to make a figure in latex” they see a result done this way and don’t know that figure/table is not required.

I’ve bought my last two laptops from System76. They default to their own PopOS now but you can still get ubuntu if you prefer.

Also, i didn’t realize there was a laptop war. But if anyone is winning, i’d have to say it’s apple. Obviously anecdotal, but i think i see more macbooks than any other specific laptop manufacturer.