Linux

Basically it doesn't matter if you can use the webapps.

Mint is the best traditional noobie distro, while I would suggest Silverblue, if you just want to use a robust system that requires far less maintenance effort than a traditional distribution with limitations that may are may not affect you at all.

I always go for Linux desktop at a job. Office 365 runs just fine in a browser. Not ideal, but MS will never give up teams to a Linux Installer again. They took down the 1 they had which wasn't great but still worked

I have the same situation at work, where I'm actually the CTO and have the power to change that but.... It's been like this for two years before I came in and right now there are a lot of dependencies to fix. It'll take at least a year to prepare tos switch away, it sucks.

Having said that.

I'm running kubuntu myself and use the web version of teams and office, which both are hilariously bad to the point where you really have to ask the question why people pay money for this shit.

Google is an evil company but at least their software works to a reasonable point. Teams and office365 and outlook are so bad that I could write a multi page bug list and that is ignoring the fact that its just so hard to get anything done. Everything requires extra clicks, teams call connection lost? Sucks to be you, you can't simply reload like in Google Meet, you have to ask your client to include you again in the call which is just sad. Outlook go back to the previous message with the browser back button which is there for exactly jat reason? Yeaaahhh, sucks to be you, buddy. Just a few random design issues from a long, long list.

Fuck everything about Microsoft

Edit: teams requires chrome, video calls won't work on firefox for the moment, causing a crash in some codec library

None of those things you've mentioned require you to install something to your system. Outlook has a website which works perfectly fine on Firefox, and you can access OneDrive on web. As for Teams, I've had varying amounts of luck with the web app, but I think that's more to do with my myriad browser addons than my system? I dunno though

I'd suggest simply dual-booting windows and your choice distro. You're going to be using Microsoft services either way, whether through the browser or native apps. Just use windows boot for school exclusively and have your onedrive and office there. and then personally use linux.

I would highly recommend against installing a pirated version of Windows like BearOfATime suggests (at least via the second link he provided) - it could cause trouble for both you and your school.

As most others said, pretty much any distro is fine. You have a powerhouse of a laptop, so running a Windows VM inside of KVM would pose no problem, but if you can, I'd advise to try avoiding a VM.

Teams is basically just a web app masquerading as a classic application using Electron, so you can just use Teams inside of your browser of choice with minimal features missing (the only one I noticed was green-screen, but I didn't care that much about it).

Even if you use a lot of Office, you'd be surprised at how similar LibreOffice is to MS Office. The UI is a lot worse IMO, but 99% of the features are there. Tables in Word/Writer seem to behave quite a bit differently for one which can get annoying, along with the usual problems of switching from one UI to another. As for formats, LibreOffice supports MS Office extensions. There are some differences in rendering because of what I see as MS bullshit, but it's limited to padding, font size, etc. (and missing fonts), but if your teachers are open to it you can easily send them the original as well as a PDF reference just in case.

I didn't use Office web apps for a few years now, but when I did they were missing a lot of features (more than 80% i'd say), but others say the situation has improved, so you can try that in your browser of choice like Teams.

If you need the desktop Office apps, you maybe could use Wine or something to run them on Linux, but I don't have any experience with that so I don't know how well they behave or how the setup is.

You could easily run a VM with KVM with the specs you listed. Personally I find the installation of KVM and Windows VM creation a bit convoluted, but there are great tutorials availiable online and it's a one-time ordeal of maybe 15-45 minutes (including VM creation, depending on how fast you want to go/how familiar with the Linux command line you are), so not that bad. Utilizing virt-manager limits command line use to just the first setup of KVM. Installing the VM can be done graphically using virt-manager.

I don't know how drawing tablet passthrough compatibility in KVM is (probably great though). RedHat drivers enable shared clipboard and dragging files over between the host and VM, so even that should be quite painless if you choose to go the VM route.

365 admin here. Use whatever distro you want and just use the web versions of Office apps. They've been greatly improved and are nearly identical to their desktop counterparts. Especially if you're leaning heavily into OneDrive/Sharepoint.

Linux won't give you much more privacy in your case. I would recommend storing and manipulating your personal data on a separate Linux machine and please don't store anything except what's absolutely necessary on OneDrive. Though if you can't afford a separate machine, you can run Linux to get at least some improvement. I think the only DE that has good MS cloud support is the latest version of GNOME so you need a distro with that DE. It can be Ubuntu 24.04 (or something based on it) or a rolling release. The last one may be more difficult to use in some cases but idk any other somewhat user friendly options.

So I'm confused. Wouldn't you want Windows? Also outlook can be replaced by Thunderbird.

So basically I see two options. First, if your device has 4 or more cores and 16gb of ram you can run Windows in KVM. If that isn't the case you need to pickup another device or not use Linux.

Microsoft pays extra attention to Ubuntu LTS and RHEL. Not my first choices, but in particular you'll see stuff like AAD auth on Azure VPN supported on Ubuntu LTS. There will also be some work going into proper Intune support, if that matters.

I would prefer Fedora or Debian for a more stable environment, and use Arch at home, but we have to keep interoperability in mind sometimes.

Another thing to look into, and I really hate to since Broadcom bought them, but you can run Windows inside VMWare, and use unity mode to break individual windows out into your DE. Beware of the new licensing.

I'm using arch Linux. But for the most part I don't think it really matters.

Flatpack Teams, and web version the rest of the M$ software.

It works well enough. Though web versions of M$ software is weirdly limited for reasons I can only understand as arbitration.

For instance very large excel files don't load in web excel, and iirc you cannot insert formulas in web word.

1. Install the user Flatpak for Teams
2. Log into your OneDrive online account, use the file manager plugin for the files
3. Use any mail client you like for the e-mail, Thunderbird for example works fine
4. Use the web version of Office, sadly