Linux

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

For the office part: Libreoffice formats differently than MS office so there may be problems, but you could also use Onlyoffice (Foss) or WPS office (free but proprietary) which have supposedly 100% compatibility. You could also use MS office web which is free

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.

When I studied at the uni 5 years ago we only collaborated over Google Docs. I'd strongly recommend online collaboration over sending files back and forth. For most things I ran Linux, and booted into Windows when there was a particular need for it, which wasn't often. But it all depends on what software you're expected to run during your studies. If you have room on your drive maybe having a minimal Windows install along side Linux could be a good thing?

Also, I'd recommend a distro that comes out of the box with working BTRFS snapshots. The last thing you want is have the machine you rely on for school shit the bed due to a bad update or something you do, and you have to learn how to repair Linux in the middle of an assignment that's due tomorrow. With snapshots you can just roll back to before it shat the bed.

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.

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.

It is pretty good actually. I can install every programming language compiler/interpreter in Linux and everything just work fine.

LibereOffice should work fine if you work on it and export it to pdf. If you want to bounce between LiberOffice and msoffice then don't expect things to go smoothly.

Any other things to keep in mind when solely using Linux for your studies Go for a stable distro like Debian, don't install bleeding edge distro like Arch or Gentoo unless you really want to.

I actually switched to Ubuntu full-time way back in 2006 when I went back to school (anthro major), specifically to help me focus when using my computer and not get distracted by playing video games. Of course, nowadays with wine and proton on steam, that might not be as effective. But it worked well for me, never experienced any issues with word docs opening in libre office (or rather open office back then) or vice versa. There was once or twice where I had to use a computer in the lab in the library to run some niche program or another for an assignment, but not a big deal.

@clark Uni sould their soul to Microsoft, not one Linux machine in sight.
However, I've been using it since last year just fine, as it was intro to programming class.
Though, I will have one electronics class down the line which uses a proprietary, Windows-only, not-gonna-give-you-a-license software, and it really sucks.
Hoping that next time it gets better...

I had a teacher who was really passionate about Ubuntu and was distributing Ubuntu 5/6 live CDs. I ended up installing it on my laptop. It was a pretty miserable experience. Everything was ugly as hell, configuring the sound card was a pain, Wi-Fi drivers had constant problems, upgrades to the new x.04/x.10 version borked the system 100℅ of the time. Pretty miserable but got the job done.

Nowadays the experience is much, much smoother. Just ensure you don't need exclusive software.

Comp sci undergrad from a mid tier university graduated in 2012, didn't need Windows at all. I mostly used an Ubuntu desktop, pocket sized mini laptop with bsd, and a red hat vdi the school provided during a research assistantship.

The school had labs in the library and comp sci building if you needed windows for something but it never came up. Group projects shared files on school provided web based tools or dropbox and used the same for class forums, sharing docs and assignments, etc. Some web stuff was broken for Firefox and had to use chrome, but never hit anything requiring IE (pre Edge).

Even if you're not in a technical field you may want to explore some of the common tools they use like git for version control (like save/restore points in a video game), LaTeX/TeX for better typesetting than office, and off-site backups.

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.

I got no pussy

MS Office works oob on Crossover and could work on Wine with a bit of tinkering. Research if your college uses examination software. If they do you are either forced to either using Windows / Mac or gambling your academic carrier via running the software on Wine.

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.