Linux

Avoid Manjaro, if you plan on entering the ArchLinux space do it with EndeavourOS.

I would avoid Ubuntu, but that is more because I dislike their politics on snaps.

You are an entry-level IT pro, so, I'd suggest EndeavourOS for personal, Debian for work. Why? Simple, Debian is widely used in professional environments, nobody will look at you weird for using a "less professional" distro.

In terms of University work, you are saying you guys use Teams and Office, probably with a student license that would give you access to a full online Office experience through the browser, just use that.

In terms of gaming, things are looking pretty good nowadays, and with a more personal distro, such as EndeavourOS, you'll get the latest advancements in gaming.

I’d recommend opensuse tumbleweed. I would suggest Debian but it moves too slow (updates) for gaming. I think arch is good but you will have to want to learn a bit more about it. Tumbleweed falls closer to Debian with stability and still near arch as far as frequent updates.

Stick to one of the major distros, not some little-known derivative. Also, please avoid Manjaro, it's horribly broken, and Ubuntu, because snap. It essentially just comes down to how you want to manage your packages.

Edit: VirtualBox is fully supported on Linux, but QEMU/KVM is better.

As long as you are okay with using the web versions of office, you can basically go with any distro, since all of them have at least a web browser and virtualbox in their repositories, as well as vs code. Jetbrains also works (I've only used intellij but I assume the others are just as easy to set up). I've never tried visual studio on linux though, not sure how well that works.

Between the three I'd go for Linux Mint. It was my first distro too, and it makes the setup process very easy, especially for users coming from Windows. Manjaro and Ubuntu are fine, plenty of people I know love them, but they've both made some decisions in recent years that I don't like. The former being negligent with security updates, and the latter forcing their own, worse, package manager on users. You shouldn't have any issues with Mint.

Most of the apps you mentioned are available for Linux, including Teams and VirtualBox, though you'll probably have to download those from their respective websites. Office 365 still works from a web browser, and you can open its documents locally with LibreOffice (though more complicated documents might have some formatting messed up). I haven't heard of uPlay, but there is an unofficial Linux client for Epic Games (called Heroic Launcher), and ~90% of Windows games either support Linux or work through a compatibility layer such as Proton.

If you're decent at programming try NixOS. 90% of your system is described by one config file and because of how it builds if a fix works for one person it'll work for pretty much everyone

(With exceptions sometimes for hardware specific stuff like Nvidia drivers which is obviously dependant on your GPU)

It's the one distro I've not really encountered any problems with out of the box

If you are a Windows user, I recommend Linux Mint.

• Office 365 and Teams can be both used as PWA, I think, so it shouldn't be a problem.
• VirtualBox and other development tools are linux supported
• Games can be sometimes pain, but thanks to steamdeck the community is huge now

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.

openSUSE Tumbleweed is my choice, I also used Pop_OS! for almost a year but if you plan on gaming and having the latest Mesa drivers and Wine + kernel updates, openSUSE is the way to go. It works the best for me and if you feel that you may want to change change your desktop beetween kde/gnome/x11/wayland I find that openSUSE simplifies that process a lot.

In my opinion, rolling release distros have less issues in the gaming and software development area.

Zorin is great! but, if gaming is really important i'd recommend dual booting so you can switch back and forth. eventually you will just let your windows os collect dust

I used Manjaro and Ubuntu for a while before settling on Garuda.

Garuda is Arch based* (like SteamOS) and offers the latest software immediately, but also has a built in snapshot system that allows you to roll back your system if any of the updates break something (Snapper automatically makes a snapshot of your system before it updates).
There are GUI apps for editing system settings (which isn't a thing on all distros! sometimes you're just editing a text config file), as well as a gaming app specific installer (Wine, Proton, Lutris, Steam, Retroarch etc)
I've used Teams, but never attempted Office365 so I can't help you there, but it sounds like you can access it via a web interface.
I code using VS Codium, the open source branch of VS Code, but I'm not sure that Visual Studio is working on Linux. There are also Microsoft specific extensions in the VS Code Extension library that won't work without third party workarounds.

Since you're already familiar with virtualbox you can spin up some of the recommended distros. and see which one you like best.
I tried Endeavour, but found that it was Garuda with fewer of the helper apps that I was used to.
Coming from MacOS/Windows, I liked having the extra apps and pre-built functionality.
I could absolutely customize it to be whatever I wanted, and some people prefer more bare-bones distros, but I found Garuda was what I was looking for straight out of the box. (except for the slightly garish theme).
I haven't seen anyone recommend Nobara yet, but that's one you should check out if gaming is a concern.

If you haven't checked out KVM/QEMU and virt-manager, I'd strongly recommend giving them a look. I set up Windows 10 and MacOS VMs that launch from icons on my dock any time I want to use Mac or Windows. If they were on discrete disks then I could get near native performance.
If you have more than one drive in your machine you don't even need to give up Mac or Win to go Linux.
I set it up on a laptop, so I didn't have a discrete disk or GPU, which impacted performance, but my plan for my desktop is to run Linux on the bare metal and use QEMU for any Mac or Microsoft products.

*I use Arch, btw

Linux Mint is great, Ubuntu is ok, I'd stay away from Manjaro. The Manjaro team is known for selectively delaying updates, which can break systems sometimes.

Teams and VirtualBox both work fine on Linux, though personally I'd recommend just using teams in the browser vs downloading the app from Microsoft.

Most games work great on Linux! A really good resource for seeing if the game you want to play works is ProtonDB. There's a compatibility rating for almost every game on Steam there (even if you didn't buy the game on Steam, ratings for the Steam version should be fairly accurate). For non-steam games, WineHQ AppDB is another good resource, though I've found it can sometimes be a bit out of date when it comes to compatibility (in a good way, it'll say games are broken sometimes when they actually work fine).

For Epic, you can use the Heroic Games Launcher. It's an open-source launcher for Epic and GOG games. It'll automatically handle setting up a wine prefix for you and everything, so all you should need to do is click "install" and then "play" once it's done. Uplay is a bit more difficult, since there's no Linux-native launcher, but it's not impossible. I believe Lutris has an installer for it, you can definitely find instructions on how to do this online.

I'm not gonna lie and say that gaming on Linux is as easy as it is on Windows, especially for a beginner. These games and apps were designed for use on Windows, and if any consideration was given for Linux, it was an afterthought. However, it's completely possible for many people to never have to use Windows for gaming. It's so, sooooo much better than it was just a few years ago, and it's only going to improve from here. You might struggle a bit as a beginner, but with time you'll learn more about how all this stuff works and eventually, if a game doesn't work, in most cases you'll be able to figure out why and fix it.

Personally, I can't remember the last time I just wasn't able to get a game running on Linux at all. There was like, one instance where cutscenes didn't work, that's the worst case I've ever encountered. I mostly stick to single-player games, but still.

I'd go with MX/Xfce, it's based on Debian. Once system is installed you'll not see a big diff between a MX/Xfce and a Manjaro/Xfce, visually, but under the hood they are completely different for instance.

Want to install xrdp to access your PC from windows RDP client? In Manjaro you have to enable AUR, download the source and compile them, it's missing all kind of base-development that you need to install, then at the end you have to tinker some config file or your screen is black, etc. In MX, it just work fine.

So try something that works fine first, like MX23 AHS version.

I use Pop OS for gaming & working and I personally suggest that, never had problems.

For games, you can check protondb for compatibility with proton/steam. For other launchers you can use Heroic Games Launcher for epic and gog. For EA Play (or how tf it is called now, ex origin) I run it from steam as a shortcut but in general you can use Lutris for them and there are particular games (like league of legends) that are executed via Lutris.

For what concerns Microsoft Teams, you can use a web browser as I do. While for office you said that you have an office 365 subscription so I suppose you can use word from a web browser.

You can use virtualbox without problems.

ubuntu is the most widely used distro and very simple to setup and gaming out of the box with steam is very simple. Distro end of the day doesn't matter all that much because you can change them to your hearts content, but for a beginner, you'd probably have the easiest time with an ubuntu distro.

Doesn't hurt to have virtual box windows on your linux box just so you can easily do some of that other stuff. While I have done fine with libre office for a long time there are definitely problems with formatting so having a windows VM would just solve that issue. Plus teams and w/e.

Epic games will take some serious tweaking, but not impossible.

I was about to ask basically the same question! I'm actually about to make the same move for my home pc, which I mostly use for streaming and gaming. I already gave a try to Fedora on a VM (gotta say this is the nerdiest name out there) , and I was REALLY impress by how simple, smooth and polish this thing is. To the point where I believe 80% of standard users would be better serve by Linux then Windoss or macOS. The univ and college where I work also uses stupid Office365, but I think you can manage most of your requiere interaction with the browser version. I'm gonna keep a Windows partition because audio and video editing isn't quite there yet, and VR doest work, but I mostly use my MacBook (not my choice) for those project so my home PC will probably run Linux 99% of the time, now that gaming works.