One of the perks of their shapeshifting power is short-range telepathy, which they use to communicate on missions while in animal form. In the book, telepathic dialogue is marked in <Angle brackets, like this> to differentiate it from “Verbal dialogue, which comes up only slightly more often.”

Second this, flashing it with Debian and using it for KODI and maybe RetroArch is the way to go.

I use VSCodium. I happen to like it pretty well, since it supports a niche language I use to mod games. I really like that it disables so many annoying features that Microsoft seems to think essential. But I wouldn’t be opposed to switching to a new IDE if it seems more workable.