I recommend Vital. Different UI but it's free and can do most (if not all) of the same stuff, from what I can tell (I've not delved deep into Alchemy). Surge XT is apparently more powerful but I find Vital offers plenty of complexity and there's a much steeper a learning curve, so I wouldn't start there.
They will always sound different to some extent but the main tone change will be pickups (I'm guessing the LTD pickups will be higher gain). You might also want to change the other electronics (matching values there could help).
New strings will sound brighter but so will thinner strings. Try some different gagues and see what feels and sounds good to you.
More generally, does it need to sound the same or could you find a different sound that you like? Part of the fun of a second guitar is the variety and how different sounds and feels bring out different playing.
I've been looking for a good channel strip for a bit as I've heard good things about them as a workflow. Also, aa it's an emulation of a physical device rather than a more perfect compressor etc, it adds some nice colouration that works really well for some instruments. The saturation is particularly nice and I'm surprised how much I like using the EQ.
The biggest difficulty is music production plugins. Some have a Linux version, some work via yabridge and wine (with some GUI bugs), and some don't work at all.
On top of that, my initial attempt was using Mint with all of the audio optimisations (including kernel) but it was stuttery and slow. Unfortunately, oving to another distro is not painless when you have to move all the plugins too but CachyOS has been much better so far.
You can install it without issue. There might be an issue if you set it to be your default Python 3 installation but that should be the only potential issue.
The other commenter isn't wrong but it might also be better to use Anaconda so your setup better matches what the course expects.
Yeah, I probably gave Bazzite less of a chance because I had so many issues installing it. I believe I had to wipe my other Linux partition to get it installed in the end.
Honestly, so far I have had no issues at all, I just run an update every now and then. I assume it'd be more difficult if this wasn't a gaming-specific partition, as that means I haven't installed much else.
It took me ages to get it installed as it couldn't cope with my EFI (I have multiple boot partitions). I had issues getting games running once I had it installed, but I can't remember what specifically those issues were as I spent longer fighting with Pop (WiFi driver issues).
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