Turns out the reply in my thread telling me the best way to combat not caring about Linux is to care about Linux was absolutely correct.
I picked up a laptop, installed Linux Mint Cinnamon, and I’m already obsessed. I haven’t had this much fun with a PC in a long time and it’s just a cheapo Dell Inspiron 3520.
The longer I spend on Lemmy the more tempted I am to give Linux another try (had an old desktop with Ubuntu 10+ years ago, but never really got the hang of it fully, can’t remember the exact details but not everything worked properly).
What holds me back is I’m in the middle of an engineering degree, I need to be able to collaborate easily on documents with word, share folders with OneDrive etc because that’s what everyone uses. Even signing into the uni’s portal-type thing is managed through your MS office account and authenticator app. And also I don’t have a lot of spare time to fiddle around getting things to work and ironing out wrinkles, even if that only needs done one and it’ll be fine in the long run…I need to be able to get on with my work reliably (maybe over Christmas I will have a bit more time to do setting up stuff).
Can anyone convince me ask these worries are unfounded? Can you still easily interact with the MS universe, or are there ways around this?
My poor wee laptop is already full to bursting with MATLAB, stm32 ide, etc so I don’t think I’d be able to partition and dual boot…
Your best focus at the moment is your degree, including during the holidays. You can Linux fanboi all you like after you’ve graduated, unless you’ve got some really strong personal convictions that push you in that direction, and it seems you haven’t otherwise you’d already be there.
I’d discourage you from formatting and using Linux (as a long time Linux user myself). Keep your setup for your education because that’s most important. If you can, get another device to install Linux on and learn how to use it that way. It’ll also be very beneficial for your career
Thanks everyone for all the helpful replies. A lot of people mentioned the office webapps, personally I’ve always detested these. Things like keyboard shortcuts for sub/superscript and support for IEEE referencing were not available as far as I remember, and in general they were more minimal than the desktop version and so slower if you needed to use many features. I think the consensus is I will stick with Windows for my uni work for now, but I can try out onlyoffice, and use a bootable USB to start learning more about Linux for later on down the road. Cheers!
Sounds like you’re entrenched. If that’s the case, don’t look at Linux until you’ve accepted that things aren’t going to be identical to Windows & there will be drawbacks to your workflow as well as benefits
I wouldn’t say I’m entrenched, I’m happy to learn new ways of doing things as and when appropriate.
On the other hand, although I would like to migrate to Linux, it’s not one of my top priorities, and it sounds like the drawbacks in compatibility when submitting documents into university systems and working on group projects would outweigh the benefits for now, for me.
But I look forward to working towards never learning what windows 11 is like!
i mean, yeah it’s basically the amount of work of a semester long course in making everything from windows work in linux
You can try exploring it first using a live usb
You can easily interact with the MS ecosystem by using the office 365 webapps. I personally prefer using onlyoffice as it’s got very good compatibility with ms formats. Teams even has a functional Linux-native client. Don’t forget to install the ms corefonts though!
I seem to remember there was a way to mount your OneDrive folders to your local linux filesystem but I don’t use that service.
I’d hold off then as I would expect you to need to iron out wrinkles with regards to collaborating with others in the MS universe.
List all the essential softwares you are using. Some of them will work natively (Teams, Matlab), some will need minimal tinkering and some would need alternatives (MS Office).
Based on what you have and what you want to do, Linux may (or may not) be a good choice.
I had a similar issue and honestly I would just recommend worrying about it later. Don’t force it, just try it when you have some free time.
I started off with dual boot to play with Linux and jump to windows when I need it. Then eventually to full Linux once I realized I never actually needed it to do all my work.
I recommend Linux mint as its the most similar to windows and is built for new Linux users. I tried Ubuntu first and the experience was pretty bad, but I learned much quicker in mint and had a much better experience right away.