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.

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?

Like others I would caution against Manjaro, the distro maintainers have shown on multiple occasions that they are not exactly on top of it all.

Ubuntu derivatives are typically great works-out-of-the-box distros. Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) has made a number of questionable moves with Ubuntu over the years so I would rather suggest going for Linux Mint instead. Mint is based on Ubuntu but IMHO fixes most of these issues.

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.

Since Microsoft Teams is an electron app, it works very well as a web app in a chromium-based browser like Brave or chromium itself, there's no real need to install any separate app. I use it daily that way and I have no issues either with screen sharing, videoconferencing or chat.

Microsoft office is a tougher nut. LibreOffice may or may not work for you - there's a good chance it won't be 100% compatible with existing office documents, and may for example slightly change pre-existing formatting. If that doesn't matter to you, LibreOffice could be completely fine as a replacement. Otherwise, Microsoft Office 365 in the browser works as well on Linux as on Windows, maybe try if that is a workable solution for you in most cases. I find that for me, the web version goes 95% of the way, and for the last 5% I keep a windows 10 VM with Office installed around.

We also are required to do some virtual machine stuff where we use virtualbox.

The de facto standard virtualization solution on Linux is KVM/QEMU, but Virtualbox does appear to exist for Linux, so I don't see a blocker there.

Also I'm a bit worried that some games on uplay, epic and other platforms aren't available anymore.

I don't play much, but I don't think there's a good solution to that. Setting up non-Steam gaming setups on Linux (e.g. via Bottles or Lutris) is IMHO finicky at best. Also, AFAIK a number of online multiplayer games don't work simply because the DRM software refuses to work on Linux. You can check ProtonDB for a database of games and their support on Linux. If there are blockers there, maybe consider a dual-boot setup.

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.

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

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.

As for Office, you'll need to use the browser version or use a VM (or container or whatever). Besides that, you can expect like 90% of games to run either via Lutris or by adding them to Steam.

If you want to play around, I recomend to try Garuda Linux Dr460nized Gaming. Yes, it is very bloated and has a very gamery aesthetic, but it comes with a lot of cool software and customizations to explore. I recently started to recreate what I like about it on EndeavourOS and it's a very good learning exercise :)

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.

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.

You can use Office365 in the browser and it will work fine. If you need a desktop app that can handle Office formats use OnlyOffice. It's free and works great with office.

Development stuff is equally available on all distros so you aren't limited by that at all.

Steam should work on all distros as well, however only the rolling releases will always have the latest libraries and drivers. LTS releases like Ubuntu and Mint won't update those frequently but it doesn't mean Steam won't work necessarily.

I use Mint because it has a lighter RAM requirement than gnome Ubuntu.

The best, most stable rolling release is opensuse Tumbleweed. Everything is tested before release, it's always on the latest and greatest, and it has system rollback built in, in the event that you need to roll back an update. But this never really happens on opensuse, it's very reliable.

If you want a rolling release I wouldn't look any further. Arch is a pain and breaks frequently. Fedora releases a new version every 6 months so it may be a possible option, but opensuse is better. Also ethically opensuse is better because Fedora is Red hat and they hate the Linux community. I'd stay well away from Fedora and Red Hat.

Currently Ubuntu 23.04 is acting as a rolling release so try it out with your desktop of choice and see if it works for you. They should eventually revert to every 6 months as from version 24

i used mint for a few years, it's pretty good and if something works on ubuntu 99% of the time it works on mint too which is handy for tech support
i used manjaro for 3 days before i switched to endeavourOS (another arch based distro) after very strong recommendations to ditch it from a very large number of people lol

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.

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.

As an engineer with years of experience in tech with more in kernel engineering there is only one distro you should use.

The one you like! Debian is great, solid, with a major market share in servers and cloud infra, with a lot of great distros broken from it for consumer use. RHEL distros are great as well but not that practice for personal use imo.

Pick something like Pop or Ubuntu for daily use and then get docker to play with other more cloud infra distros like ubuntu server, centos, aml, and get web services running through those if you want to expand your knowledge.

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.

Fedora KDE spin or OpenSUSE.

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 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.

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.

For the university work you could try libreoffice, it works on windows too if would like to try, Epic games work through Heroic games launcher or the Epic games launcher trough wine. Please do not use Manjaro as your starter distro, it's very unstable, Ubuntu is not your best option, Linux mint might be the way to go if you want something simple. You could try out fedora workstation, or fedora kde spin, it's great, only remember to use flatpak for your multimedia apps.

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 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

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