So, at school we use the whole Office 365 suite for a myriad of tasks.
Teams is used as the main way to share exercises and lesson material, Outlook is used as the resident email service, and you’re expected to use OneDrive to store all/most of your data. There are some additional apps that require Windows, but beyond the office 365 suite they are all replaceable.
What I’m wondering is, what distro can run/access those apps without too much hassle and set-up?
I’m looking to do this on a HP probook x360, upgraded to 32 GB of ram. The only peripheral of note I’ve got is a Ugee drawing tablet, but I can use the openTabletDriver or their own on some distro’s.
Edit: Thanks guys!
User helpimnotdrowning recommend Mint! This’ll be my first real daily foray onto Linux, so it’s definitely a good option. I’ll also have a look at Gnome Vs KDE. I’ve been looking at KDE in the past, but gnome is definitely worth a peep as well.
User BearOfATime, thanks for giving the software name that allows for a seamless VPN transition! I’ll also look into the win 10 LTSC. Not sure it’s a right fit, but it’s always fun to learn more!
As a couple of you recommend, there seems to be a teams flatpak to download, so I’ll have a look into that!
Finally, I’d like to thank y’all for the useful and helpful answers! Many of you said to try the webapps, so I’ll be doing that! My current plan is to use VMWare (alt is Vbox. VMware works (and looks) better) and try to actively use a mint VM. Not sure If I’ll be able to stick to it, and not unknowingly switch to windows, but having it as a starting app should solve a couple issues. Slower start times, sure, but that’s not the worst. Your advice is very much appreciated! It’s given me a good confidence boost to start. Thanks for that :D
As most others said, pretty much any distro is fine. You have a powerhouse of a laptop, so running a Windows VM inside of KVM would pose no problem, but if you can, I’d advise to try avoiding a VM.
Teams is basically just a web app masquerading as a classic application using Electron, so you can just use Teams inside of your browser of choice with minimal features missing (the only one I noticed was green-screen, but I didn’t care that much about it).
Even if you use a lot of Office, you’d be surprised at how similar LibreOffice is to MS Office. The UI is a lot worse IMO, but 99% of the features are there. Tables in Word/Writer seem to behave quite a bit differently for one which can get annoying, along with the usual problems of switching from one UI to another. As for formats, LibreOffice supports MS Office extensions. There are some differences in rendering because of what I see as MS bullshit, but it’s limited to padding, font size, etc. (and missing fonts), but if your teachers are open to it you can easily send them the original as well as a PDF reference just in case.
I didn’t use Office web apps for a few years now, but when I did they were missing a lot of features (more than 80% i’d say), but others say the situation has improved, so you can try that in your browser of choice like Teams.
If you need the desktop Office apps, you maybe could use Wine or something to run them on Linux, but I don’t have any experience with that so I don’t know how well they behave or how the setup is.
You could easily run a VM with KVM with the specs you listed. Personally I find the installation of KVM and Windows VM creation a bit convoluted, but there are great tutorials availiable online and it’s a one-time ordeal of maybe 15-45 minutes (including VM creation, depending on how fast you want to go/how familiar with the Linux command line you are), so not that bad. Utilizing virt-manager limits command line use to just the first setup of KVM. Installing the VM can be done graphically using virt-manager.
I don’t know how drawing tablet passthrough compatibility in KVM is (probably great though). RedHat drivers enable shared clipboard and dragging files over between the host and VM, so even that should be quite painless if you choose to go the VM route.