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.
Office 365 won’t work. If you need that specific piece of software, give up and stay on windows. It can however be replaced with libreoffice or OpenOffice. If these work for you, you’re in luck because just about everything supports them. Software design is better on Linux than windows imo, and most if not all of your tools will be available. As for gaming from steam your set. Proton can run just about any game you throw at it. Teams has a Linux client that works, and afaik there is also a web client. Virtual machines are better than on windows by a mile. If you need virtual box it does exist and work, there is however virtual machine manager which is even more powerful and just plain better. Uplay games are a bit trickier, you can use a program called bottles to run the launcher and play your games there, but if you need/want any per-game tweaks you can’t do that. Epic is easy, heroic games launcher is an almost fully-featured epic games launcher replacement with proper wine integration.
For distribution, I have to recommend you steer clear of manjaro. They have had numerous security problems in the past few years, some having been repeated showing they aren’t learning from their mistakes. Additionally it lets you use the aur but that can easily break your system. It’s a poorly managed distribution that I can’t recommend. Ubuntu as well has made some anti-user moves like forcing their tech on users rather than adopting the standards everyone else has. Mint try’s to correct this, and it does a good job. I can recommend mint, however it is fairly slow to get updates and hence is gonna be bad for gaming.
What I recommend is gonna be nobara or fedora. Fedora is a bit trickier to use because the setup and configuration will probably require the command line, however once it’s running it’s really stable and has a lot of newer software so everything you have is up to date. Nobara adds some gaming tweaks on top of that and is a little slow to update major versions, but it has a graphical way to configure probably everything you need and has some qol patches for things like vrr that others don’t have. Additionally as you mentioned you are in IT I think this will be a good fit as the server software that you will interact with is most likely gonna be rhel as it’s the most popular enterprise Linux. It is based upon fedora, so you will be able to interact with it easier should you ever need to.