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.

It was good! I really enjoyed it

Computer Science graduate here

It’s great, and in fact the recommended setup. We even had a lab running Ubuntu, managed by a bunch of volunteers that pass down sysadmin knowledge.

There was this one class, tho, that required MS Visual C++ 2008. There was no way around it, so what I did was I installed Windows on VM.

Office document support was janky with LibreOffice but it got the job done for me. They seem to have improved a lot recently, so you probably won’t have issue.

Even up to today, I never felt the need to have Windows. Some proprietary softwares like Zoom are available thru Flatpak while the Windows-only ones like Adobe Acrobat can be installed thru Wine.

The only times I had to have Windows was to play certain video games. In general, I could live without them, as most video games are playable on Linux with Wine (thanks, Steam!), while some others provide Linux native port.

It depends on the college and the region honestly. Remember they are trying to prepare you for a job.

With that being said Linux tends to be pretty popular in high ed especially in computer science. Mac OS and of course Windows also have a foothold. I would get into virtualization and distrobox (podman). Even if something is natively supported on Linux is best not to pollute your system with junk. Create separate environments for everything.

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.