Hey guys, I’m an entry-level IT professional and tech enthusiast.
I’m getting a bit sick of windows for a multitude of reasons and want to try out some Linux distros.
I use my pc for web browsing, university (which uses office 365) where I study software design, software development (vs code, visual studio, jetbrains stuff) and gaming (99% of the time via steam).
My main concerns for switching are that I’ll have a hard time with university work because we mostly use teams for video conferences and work together with word, and other office stuff. We also are required to do some virtual machine stuff where we use virtualbox.
Also I’m a bit worried that some games on uplay, epic and other platforms aren’t available anymore.
For distros I’ve been mainly looking at Manjaro, Linux Mint or plain old Ubuntu. Can you recommend anything that might fit for me or will I maybe run into any issues with my chosen three?
Edit: Thanks a lot for all the replies. I’ve read through all of them even if I didn’t reply and it was very helpful. I will test most of your suggestions in a VM before I jump into completely changing my OS. And I’ll probably try booting from a USB Drive first. What I didn’t mention is that I’ve already worked with Ubuntu, Debian and CentOS, so I’m not scared about having to use a CLI.
I’m terms of software, most distro are going to be the same, especially debian-based ones (Ubuntu, mint, pop, etc.) I think Mint is a great choice - cinnamon is a good, familiar desktop environment for windows users, and unlike ubintu it has flatpak support so you get a lot of up to date apps through that. I’ll admit I’m biased though, and manjaro is probably great as well - I’d even suggest plain Arch, the new installer makes things really easy if you’re somewhat tech savvy.
Office 365 can be accessed online, or a foss office suite like Libreoffice or Onlyoffice can edit and save to Microsoft file formats. Comparability is usually pretty good unless you’re doing something really weird.
Unfortunately visual studio is a no-go. VSCode and Jetbrains work though.
Teams will also work through the browser. I believe they also have a PWA now for chrome. My company actually uses teams all the time even though they dev team is mostly on Linux.
There are alternative launchers for games outside of steam. Heroic is one I personally use - it supports Epic and GOG. Just check protondb to see if the games you care about work. IDK about Uplay but if you look around you might find something.