I study computer science and it’s definitely been an advantage. That being said, I believe circumstances might wary between institutions, countries, subjects and teachers a lot.
For documents, when we have a group task, we just use collaboration platforms online, like Google docs. Gets the job done easily.
When you’re alone, using free stuff shouldn’t be a problem.
A little advice: don’t bother with latex and use typst instead. Latex works but it’s often weird and the error messages are hidden in a thousand lines of “unfull hbox”