Linux

Used it for physics stuff

So far I've been able to run everything I need to off of it, and libreoffice works very well with office docs in my experience.

I study computer science and it's definitely been an advantage. That being said, I believe circumstances might wary between institutions, countries, subjects and teachers a lot.

For documents, when we have a group task, we just use collaboration platforms online, like Google docs. Gets the job done easily.

When you're alone, using free stuff shouldn't be a problem.

A little advice: don't bother with latex and use typst instead. Latex works but it's often weird and the error messages are hidden in a thousand lines of "unfull hbox"

Current student here (CS, so sadly not in your field):

In my case, college/university actually made sure, I and many others would be using Linux as their main system. The computer lab is using Linux (Ubuntu 22.04 mainly) although Windows machines (mostly for beginner courses) and Macs (for stuff like Final Cut Pro and other Apple exclusive software) are available and many courses are either requiring or putting mainline support towards Linux.

Document wise - we were taught LaTeX from day 1 and are expected to have at least the knowledge to utilize the given .cls files. Sharing documents is rather a free-for-all: When LaTeX is required for the course, either Overleaf or the university git is the choice for group-work, otherwise there aren't requirements for using .docx files or other files.

Hope I could give you an insight, although not in your field.

I set up dual boot but ended up only running Windows once when I had trouble with my Windows VMs. You'll be fine.
Especially since MSOffice everything is just browser apps anyway.

I'm currently using Arch Linux in college and my advice will be to dual boot. In some lower div classes my specific professor wanted Visual Studio .sln files so there was no other way (I guess you could VM it but I'm not trusting that with my grade).

Group sharing documents, our schools and most schools are in the MS ecosystem so you can edit on word online through the onedrive thing.

For writing stuff I would mostly use libreoffice with the LanguageTool plugin installed.

For lockdown proctored exams, I would typically get a loaner laptop from school because no way am I downloading their sussy stuff.

Edit: Since you're studying to be a psychologist, my first paragraph will probably not apply to you. If you want to, dual boot, if not, I think maybe you could boot up a vm if there's some really niche use cases.

My experience was that the school provided free Windows keys for a personal computer if you needed one (they didn’t provide the computer itself) but the majority of computers I interacted with on campus (mostly in the computer lab) were Linux (some Debian variant iirc). I think the printing computers in the library were windows. I took an art class at one point and they had Macs (it was for using the Apple’s Final Cut Pro).

We never used LibreOffice though. Everyone just uses Google Drive.

I've used GNU/OpenBSD all the way through community college (US) with minor issues. Biggest issue is having to use platforms like zoom for some online courses, which requires an RTC capable browser (aka firefox or chromium, neither of which I am a big fan of) for the webclient, which the company clearly does not want you using as they won't actually give a prompt to use the webclient until you click their link to fail opening their native spyware client (so who knows when the webclient will just disappear altogether). Another issue was professors using proprietary microsoft formats which require installing libreoffice, which isn't tooling I particularly enjoy using, but at least the option is there. I haven't had to use a malware "lockdown" browser or anything like that thankfully (though if I had to, I'd just use computers on-campus to do the work). Most classes allow submissions in PDF, and if the syllabus only allows docx submissions, the professor will allow me to submit PDF after contacting them.

Funny enough, my college pushed me to a Linux dual boot.

One of my classes required an Ubuntu environment for C++ programming, and after trying and failing to get WSL working, I decided to just dual boot (from 2 separate SSDs) instead of trying to work around the limitations of a VM.

On the other hand, 2 of my other classes required a Windows-only program.

I used to default to Windows, but after the BS from Microsoft this year I switched to defaulting to Ubuntu.

I studied CompSci, so a very technical field, and with one exception (Power BI), everything I used ran on Linux just as well. For my Thesis, I used TeXStudio. For normal writing or presentations, I just used LibreOffice. For calculations, I used Python. For collaborative document editing, we used Google Docs.

Word of caution: LibreOffice supports the various formats of MS Office, but I've had issues the other way around, where a presentation I created in LO wouldn't work in MSO. If you need to collab on files together, I'd recommend Google Docs. If it's just you, I recommend sending PDF versions along with (or instead of) the original file, just to be sure.

you can just dual boot linux next to Windows and switch to Windows when needed. I really like my linux fedora - way more than windows or macos.

What do i like about it?

• it's very easy to work with multiple virtual desktops
• it looks way more beautiful and is more fun to work with
• extentions make it very customizable, e.g. in the top left I can see the title and artist of the current song playing.
• the feeling of of not being spied on, at least on the os level, I still think online is a lot of tracking
• the apps are open source and trustable and do just what they are suppoesed to do and nothing more
  • there is an app to download youtube videos (parabolic)
  • the audio player is very beautiful and minimalistic - I miss it on windows (amberol)
  • the app solanum is a timer app just for the pomodoro time management method. It helped me a lot
  • for notes I use Joplin, which does the job reliable. But I have to admit that I liked working with OneNote more, since it has more functionality and way better pen support.

Regarding office was my experience that MS Office is still better if you have to make an presentation or want to work at the same document at the same time. For basic office work LibreOffice is fine. I would use OnlyOffice if you want better compatibility with MS Office.

I booted windows only if I had to do a presentation or work with an Windows exclusive programm. But most of the time (around 90-95%) I used happily Linux Fedora. I use it for note taking, listening to music, browsing the web and reading & marking PDFs.

I use Firefox as my primary browser but it has sometimes problems with some videos. Then I switch to Brave which does not have those issues. I general I think Linux needs some time to get used to and wants to be discoverd. It's not that difficult as it may sound but probably wont be a without some learning curve and looking some things up online. I recommend doing it since my user experience has been much better than on windows or macos - plus the privacy thing :)

It was good! I really enjoyed it

I did computer science 5 years ago and it was mostly good. I used KDE Neon before it was considered a real user distro by developers so I had some Wayland issues. When I tried to use the commandline and edit config files manually I messed stuff up but using the distro as intended was always nice and easy.

Your milage may vary depending on what programs your school forces you to use because universities don't support anything except Linux and Mac. I want to argue for accessibility but teachers don't care enough.

Big waste of time. Spent too much time troubleshooting to get it working on my laptop before I just said "fuck it" and installed Windows. There was way too much software compatibility issues and I was spending more time troubleshooting than I was studying. I'm sure Linux can work for some students but for me and the field I majored in, Linux is no bueno.

I had no issues with compatibility, just made sure to save documents to older microsoft office formats in the hopes of avoiding issues.

I never had to use an exam browser or anything like that, I'd imagine you'd want to have a polite conversation with the instructor if that were to occur, perhaps they can make an exception or allow you to do it on a library computer

Collaboration was always over google docs, so there were never any problems working with others. My CS classes were all expected to be done in Linux VMs so that was sort of ideal. Other science/humanities classes were totally software-agnostic.

I'm doing a CIS degree right now, and I did 99% of my first year on fedora. I did need a full windows install because some exams took place using a lock down software.

Honestly, the hardest part was remembering to boot into windows the day before so it could update and stabilize for the exam the next day

Honestly, if you're sharing office files you're probably using office 365. This means everything is a web app first and therefore Linux compatible.

I tried using the desktop version of word on a Mac last week, and the latency was so bad on a shared document that I had to switch to the web app anyway.

Basically, if you just want to use Linux you'll be fine. If instead you don't want to use Microsoft, you'll probably have lots of problems.

Microsoft have been brutally effective in getting their tentacles into academic institutes, and you'll find that everything from email to logging into internal sites relies on an office 365 account.

I had a cis major and I didn't have issues using Linux all that often. One class we had to write code in VisualStudio, before the Linux version existed. My professor was fine with me using my own IDE as long as the code compiled on Windows, which it did after adding about 3 lines of code to the start.

If we had shared documents they went in Google docs, and libre office, (open office at the time) docs were exported as PDF before submitting. I also had a Windows 10 VM ready to go just in case, but rarely used it.

I used linux all through the years I should have been in college, but was instead a hopeless drug addict. I regret nothing!!!

...apart from the drugs....

...and not going to college...

It was my college experience. Didn't use anything else. No issues at all

Most of the time it was not an issue. Occasionally a teacher gave us a office document that loaded a bit funky, but it never blocked me from doing my assignments.

Deliverables were PDFs, so it really doesn't matter what you use.

I do remember having to learn some ghostscript command so that I could edit PDFs and stitch together a bunch of PDFs into one file. It was annoyingly difficult to edit PDFs back then, but I figured it out.

It was 1993, so not super impressed, but I needed a tex distribution, and PC dos tex sucked. The best option was a Nextcube, but that was a little out of reach being as much as tuition. Or use the x terminals in the crowded computer lab (shudder).

But I was able to keep that slackware install up and working just long enough to get my thesis done.

Software engineering student here. Well we had a course about Microsoft excel but i used Libreoffice and almost got a full mark. There were no problem with lessons like Advanced programming (C#) and Data structure (C and C++) and few others with languages like python and php. There has been few courses that requires softwares that are not available on linux(Cisco packet tracer and Proteus) but wine solved the problem perfectly. Back in high school i even managed to run Visual Studio but it was hard tbh. I don't know about what they teach on the other countries colleges but i think you should mostly be fine with linux and wine.

Ex CS student. I'm on 100 % Linux, even back then.
Huge advantage in the Linux/Unix, networking labs.

The main issues were Matlab (Octave is kinda ok, but must be tested before you submit your project),
FPGA simulator - Altera (no alternatives, but it can be run on a Windows VM),
3ds Max - must be run on bare-metal Windows (maybe GPU passthrough to a VM will work),
some old weird software,
C getch() on Linux.

No problems with MS Office, I can run whatever I want, just exported it to the PDF.
No heavy formatting in drafts helps with a group project.

Almost everything was web based. Being in computer science i did have to write code and compile executables that my TAs running Windows could run; so it wasn't perfectly smooth. There was also Respondus Lockdown, but I could borrow a laptop from the library to use it.

It went great. I mostly had to submit files in PDF, which allowed any office software to work perfectly.

That is until covid came around and I had to do proctored online exams. The proctoring software doesn't support linux.

I used UNIX on a greenscreen terminal at university before Windows was even released. There were no compatibility problems because nobody used computers outside of CS departments. And now get off my lawn, damn kids!

I would use OnlyOffice instead of LibreOffice since it has better overall compatibility with MS Office and overall better UX.

I’ve loved Linux for college. Studying CS and Math, graduating soon. Just know your requirements software wise and be prepared to find workarounds or dual boot if necessary. I never had to dual boot but I was able to use Google docs or the browser version of office for anything requiring office formatting or collaborative work. I also couldn’t download some testing software on Linux (respondus lockdown browser 🤢) and used a school desktop in the library to run that when necessary. I love my workflow though outside of those niggles and couldn’t ask for a better research and development OS

College the art dept ran Macintosh OS X while computer science ran Solaris & Windows (outside of C# this didn’t matter). I had a OS X/Windows dual boot laptop at the time as well as a Windows/Linux (Crunchbang) desktop which let me accomplish everything. Adobe products were pretty easy to pirate at the time, & I was intially annoyed WINE didn’t really work with them, but I worked slowly towards getting skills in the FOSS tools & when Adobe moved to a cloud subscription model I said “fuck ’em”. The tools are certanily good enough if not better if you learn them. The CS stuff was much easier with Linux to get compilers & whatnot. OpenOffice was fine for everything else. Professors were never asshats & cared that you completed the assignment rather than what specific tool for file format you were using so long as there was something they could easily view (such as PDF). If I really needed some dumb app, I could just use the computer lab. I carried around a stateful distro on a USB as well so I could get around the opposite issue of not having my Linux tools at say the library that was all Microsoft.

Outside of classwork, Pidgin+libpurple & a browser covered my use cases.

In comp sci our labs ran fedora and I didn't even know what Linux was I just laughed at the computer saying fedora. I thought I was on Mac tbh.

I login to the student outlook email on the web and use OnlyOffice with Microsoft fonts installed. Presentations and Documents work as needed. I got a fellow student to switch to Linux and he's had no issues either.