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How was your experience using Linux in college?

This is aimed at students/ex-students that used Linux while studying in college.

I’m asking because I’ll be starting college next year and I don’t know how much Windows-dependency to expect (will probably be studying to become a psychologist, so no technical education).

I’m also curious about how well LibreOffice and Microsoft Office mesh, i.e. can you share and edit documents together with MOffice users if you use LibreOffice?

Any other things to keep in mind when solely using Linux for your studies? Was it ever frustrating for you to work on group projects with shared documents? Anything else? Give me your all.

kionite231 ,

It is pretty good actually. I can install every programming language compiler/interpreter in Linux and everything just work fine.

LibereOffice should work fine if you work on it and export it to pdf. If you want to bounce between LiberOffice and msoffice then don’t expect things to go smoothly.

Any other things to keep in mind when solely using Linux for your studies Go for a stable distro like Debian, don’t install bleeding edge distro like Arch or Gentoo unless you really want to.

clark OP ,
@clark@midwest.social avatar

From what I have heard, the most beginner-friendly distros are Fedora, Mint, and Pop!OS, but I’ll be looking at and comparing Debian as well.

solidgrue ,
@solidgrue@lemmy.world avatar

Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) is a solid pick. All thenperks and integration of Mint, without Ubuntu.

…Ubuntu which, yes, is a Debian downstream. People have their opinions on it. It works. It has its nuisances, but it works.

ProtonBadger ,

I haven’t used either, just curious; what kind of difference is there between regular Ubuntu based Mint and LMDE? I thought it was mostly just more recent packages with the Ubuntu base?

EnderMB ,

We installed Slackware. One kid bet me that Linux wouldn’t let him drag his entire drive into the bin to delete. It did, and we all laughed, including the professor - who still gave him the passing grade since he’d seen enough of it working before it went up in flames.

pathief ,
@pathief@lemmy.world avatar

I had a teacher who was really passionate about Ubuntu and was distributing Ubuntu 5/6 live CDs. I ended up installing it on my laptop. It was a pretty miserable experience. Everything was ugly as hell, configuring the sound card was a pain, Wi-Fi drivers had constant problems, upgrades to the new x.04/x.10 version borked the system 100℅ of the time. Pretty miserable but got the job done.

Nowadays the experience is much, much smoother. Just ensure you don’t need exclusive software.

superkret ,

I was forced to. I had no money and needed a PC for my studies.
A roommate gifted me his old desktop with OpenSUSE.
For at least 2 days I googled various forms of “how to install programs on Linux” and got more and more frustrated, cause all I found was stuff you had to compile yourself, or things called “packages”. But I didn’t want “packages”, I wanted programs.
On the third day I found the YaST package manager and was immediately blown away by the fact you could search, download and install everything you need without hunting it down on various websites.
That was 20 years ago. Been on Linux ever since.

recreationalplacebos ,

I actually switched to Ubuntu full-time way back in 2006 when I went back to school (anthro major), specifically to help me focus when using my computer and not get distracted by playing video games. Of course, nowadays with wine and proton on steam, that might not be as effective. But it worked well for me, never experienced any issues with word docs opening in libre office (or rather open office back then) or vice versa. There was once or twice where I had to use a computer in the lab in the library to run some niche program or another for an assignment, but not a big deal.

gramgan ,

The people I know in my program (undergrad History) use their computers for little more than Google Chrome (specifically Google’s Office suite), a PDF reader (sometimes also Google Chrome), sometimes Zotero, and sometimes MS Word. We get a lot of Mac’s around here, so one can imagine Microsoft products are not highly relied upon, generally speaking.

Everything’s through the browser nowadays, so I’d say just pick a stable distro, install 2 or three browsers in case something doesn’t work (like Google Docs with Firefox in my experience…), and submit everything as PDF.

Can’t speak much to LibreOffice as I write my papers in Typst (and before that in LaTeX, which got me brownie points with some of the older professors), which I find much faster, easier, and more flexible than WYSIWYG word processors.

WhiteBerry ,

Just finished my Master’s this year.

I belonged to the Department of Computer Science at a university in the UK so granted there’s a lot of bias here:

I will point out a few observations, without going into much detail or reasoning:

  1. Microsoft’s Office suite was a non-requirement. For collaboration, everyone was using Google’s Office suite (Google Docs, Sheets) or Overleaf (Premium if we signed up with our university email).
  2. Around half (maybe more) were MacOS users, maybe 25-25% split between Linux and Windows.
  3. Lots of iPads, particularly in any Maths classes.

Anything else to keep in mind? Yes, that people are ignorant. Even in our CS department people used to actively avoid using Linux, a lot of people will buy Macbooks because of reasons I would attribute more to the demographics of CS students, i.e. primarily from Asian countries where Apple is seen as a economic symbol.

Be prepared for people to judge you (not saying they should, but that they likely will). If you want to avoid this judgement, get an Apple silicon Macbook Air or something. However, I commend you for going out of your way to learn and wanting to reduce your dependency on Windows. I think that learning to be comfortable with the machine will help you in the future, most likely indirectly.

Lastly, keep in mind that when we have discussions about privacy or Linux or not supporting big tech companies who we might not agree with (e.g. Microsoft, Google, Apple etc) it’s never a binary problem. You might find that you will end up relying on teams for internal communication or that your university email is with outlook/office365.

Try and do your bit, but don’t be too harsh on yourself. :)

Needless to say, if you’re looking for a laptop that runs Linux well plenty of people will tell you to buy a used thinkpad (great from a value perspective), or if you’d prefer some of the new kidz stuff then a Tuxedo notebook.

Do not make the mistake of buying a notebook which doesn’t have a reputation of good Linux support. I bought a HP notebook (can’t quite remember the model number right now but can get back to you) and still no sound without manual kernel module patch :D

Telorand ,

If you want to avoid this judgement, get an Apple silicon Macbook Air or something…

Or save a few bucks, buy whatever laptop in silver, cover the logo with a sticker, and use elementaryOS or theme your DE to be Mac-like.

(Great advice, btw)

tabular ,
@tabular@lemmy.world avatar

If you want to avoid this judgement (being a Linux user)

We’re here, we’re queer, Linux is top gear!

SexualPolytope , (edited )
@SexualPolytope@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

I’ve been using exclusively Linux since high school, and now I’m doing a PhD in math. It’s always been pretty smooth. I used to have a separate Windows rig for gaming, but don’t really need it anymore, now that Proton works very well with most games. (I don’t really play AAA games, so that helps.)

Coming to the point, for academic stuff, I mostly needed to use a PDF reader (Zathura and qPdfView), LaTeX, and some computation and graphing software (mostly SageMath). I sometimes needed to use DOCX files, but LibreOffice works well for that. Most other software I need from time to time are usually Linux native.

Also, many universities provide access to O365. I’ve used it in some rare cases where I needed to provide input in some collaborative document. But in most cases, I was able to convince my friends/colleagues to use Google Docs instead.

Unless you do CAD, or some creative work, Linux should be perfect for your usecase.

WhiteBerry ,

I had a Maths Prof who used Mint so this kinda checks out

whotookkarl , (edited )
@whotookkarl@lemmy.world avatar

Comp sci undergrad from a mid tier university graduated in 2012, didn’t need Windows at all. I mostly used an Ubuntu desktop, pocket sized mini laptop with bsd, and a red hat vdi the school provided during a research assistantship.

The school had labs in the library and comp sci building if you needed windows for something but it never came up. Group projects shared files on school provided web based tools or dropbox and used the same for class forums, sharing docs and assignments, etc. Some web stuff was broken for Firefox and had to use chrome, but never hit anything requiring IE (pre Edge).

Even if you’re not in a technical field you may want to explore some of the common tools they use like git for version control (like save/restore points in a video game), LaTeX/TeX for better typesetting than office, and off-site backups.

HobbitFoot ,

Mainly only with my PS2.

priapus ,

I’ve used Linux all through college and haven’t had any problems. I never had to use Windows only software for my degree, but I can’t really say what you might need. LibreOffice can mess up the formatting of more complex documents, but will normally be fine. If you’re working in a group project and need to use shared docs you can always use Word or Google Docs online.

HubertManne ,

I didn't but it was the early nineties and honestly I did not even realize the command line was unix on machines vs dos. I just thought I was messing up the terms or it was just a variant system. I did not realize all dos was the same.

electric_nan ,

Depends on your school/classes. I had no problems. Last school I attended used MS for email etc. I got a discounted license for Office which I was able to access in the browser if/whenever LibreOffice wasn’t a good option.

bobs_monkey ,

For what is worth, I’ve had better luck on MSOffice integration with onlyoffice, but ymmv

clark OP ,
@clark@midwest.social avatar

I’ve actually not researched that much about OnlyOffice but I’ll definitely be sure to do that.

eco_game ,

+1 on OnlyOffice, it has 1:1 formatting compatibility with Microsoft Office. Unlike LibreOffice, it doesn’t have to translate documents between odt and docx in the background.

In the same vein, OnlyOffice has poor compatibility with odt files etc.

bobs_monkey ,

I’ve definitely notice weirdness with odt files, but truth be told I damn never run into those, everything is xlsx, docx, etc as I’m interfacing with companies that are firmly MS, but they’re also none the wiser usually. Every now and again there’ll be a formatting issue, especially with Excel, but it isn’t too common thankfully.

avidamoeba ,
@avidamoeba@lemmy.ca avatar

I’ve used Ubuntu on a laptop during my undergrad 2008-13. I used LyX to write anything I’d submit, including some psych work. I’ve used LibreOffice (OpenOffice) for some stuff too. I had to use MS Office or some other Windows-only software on occasion. I used a Windows VM for that. I’ve kept this formula till present day. Linux (Ubuntu LTS/Debian) on the hardware, Windows VM on Linux for special occasions.

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