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.
You can use Office365 in the browser and it will work fine. If you need a desktop app that can handle Office formats use OnlyOffice. It’s free and works great with office.
Development stuff is equally available on all distros so you aren’t limited by that at all.
Steam should work on all distros as well, however only the rolling releases will always have the latest libraries and drivers. LTS releases like Ubuntu and Mint won’t update those frequently but it doesn’t mean Steam won’t work necessarily.
I use Mint because it has a lighter RAM requirement than gnome Ubuntu.
The best, most stable rolling release is opensuse Tumbleweed. Everything is tested before release, it’s always on the latest and greatest, and it has system rollback built in, in the event that you need to roll back an update. But this never really happens on opensuse, it’s very reliable.
If you want a rolling release I wouldn’t look any further. Arch is a pain and breaks frequently. Fedora releases a new version every 6 months so it may be a possible option, but opensuse is better. Also ethically opensuse is better because Fedora is Red hat and they hate the Linux community. I’d stay well away from Fedora and Red Hat.
Currently Ubuntu 23.04 is acting as a rolling release so try it out with your desktop of choice and see if it works for you. They should eventually revert to every 6 months as from version 24
As an example, i use mint as the base of my kvm/qemu virtual machine since i run an arc 380 on base and nvidia gpu for the guest. I made the mistake of updating my experimental kernel and forgot to set quiet and mint menu on grub to select the kernel at boot time. I popped in the install disc i had used previusly and fixed it by using the inlcuded programs to edit the grub and undo my kernel update. Fixed and i saved a timevault snapshot of the fix in case i mess up again. Linux mint saved me from reinstalling my entire os from a simple mistake.