Personally, I’ve had no problems whatsoever running the Office 365 apps needed by my school on Debian’s version of Firefox ESR. Aside from Outlook and Teams, I’m not asked to use them very often, as most assignments are turned in as PDFs, but when I have been required to use Word and Excel, I have had no problems.

Apparently GNOME 46 introduced support for Microsoft 365 accounts including OneDrive support in the file manager, so a distro that runs a recent GNOME version, such as Fedora or Ubuntu, may be your best option. But without that, you can still use a third-party project like onedriver or abraunegg’s OneDrive client.

None of those things you’ve mentioned require you to install something to your system. Outlook has a website which works perfectly fine on Firefox, and you can access OneDrive on web. As for Teams, I’ve had varying amounts of luck with the web app, but I think that’s more to do with my myriad browser addons than my system? I dunno though

For teams specifically I’m just using the web version with chromium. Installed as a chromium app so I have quick access to it and have it on my taskbar. Rest of Office 365 works just fine in any browser. (Outlook, SharePoint, Power apps etc) For OneDrive Sync you can use https://abraunegg.github.io/ which should work on most distros.

Micro$oft loves Open-source… Well, … not unless they need to support it, instead of ripper off all the open-source developers.

I always go for Linux desktop at a job. Office 365 runs just fine in a browser. Not ideal, but MS will never give up teams to a Linux Installer again. They took down the 1 they had which wasn’t great but still worked

Basically it doesn’t matter if you can use the webapps.

Mint is the best traditional noobie distro, while I would suggest Silverblue, if you just want to use a robust system that requires far less maintenance effort than a traditional distribution with limitations that may are may not affect you at all.

I’m using arch Linux. But for the most part I don’t think it really matters.

Flatpack Teams, and web version the rest of the M$ software.

It works well enough. Though web versions of M$ software is weirdly limited for reasons I can only understand as arbitration.

For instance very large excel files don’t load in web excel, and iirc you cannot insert formulas in web word.

I would highly recommend against installing a pirated version of Windows like BearOfATime suggests (at least via the second link he provided) - it could cause trouble for both you and your school.

Any distro that can run Chromium / Chrome. And everything other than Teams will work even on Firefox.

365 admin here. Use whatever distro you want and just use the web versions of Office apps. They’ve been greatly improved and are nearly identical to their desktop counterparts. Especially if you’re leaning heavily into OneDrive/Sharepoint.

Any distro you’d like. Use the office / outlook stuff in a browser. I believe kde has a way to use onedrive in dolphin, though personally I would keep my data on my computer unless it is for a group project, just make sure it’s backed up. I’d also have a VM handy with the spice guest tools. It is good to have at least for when you have to hand your computer to someone who may be uncomfortable with linux. I would use debian on a school computer for the ludicrous stability, but use whatever floats your boat.

Any distro should work just fine, so the typical three: Debian, Fedora, Arch, or something else. Gnome 46 supposedly added support for Microsoft accounts as well as onedrive in the Nautilus file manager, so you should be able to “store all of your data.”

As most others said, pretty much any distro is fine. You have a powerhouse of a laptop, so running a Windows VM inside of KVM would pose no problem, but if you can, I’d advise to try avoiding a VM.

Teams is basically just a web app masquerading as a classic application using Electron, so you can just use Teams inside of your browser of choice with minimal features missing (the only one I noticed was green-screen, but I didn’t care that much about it).

Even if you use a lot of Office, you’d be surprised at how similar LibreOffice is to MS Office. The UI is a lot worse IMO, but 99% of the features are there. Tables in Word/Writer seem to behave quite a bit differently for one which can get annoying, along with the usual problems of switching from one UI to another. As for formats, LibreOffice supports MS Office extensions. There are some differences in rendering because of what I see as MS bullshit, but it’s limited to padding, font size, etc. (and missing fonts), but if your teachers are open to it you can easily send them the original as well as a PDF reference just in case.

I didn’t use Office web apps for a few years now, but when I did they were missing a lot of features (more than 80% i’d say), but others say the situation has improved, so you can try that in your browser of choice like Teams.

If you need the desktop Office apps, you maybe could use Wine or something to run them on Linux, but I don’t have any experience with that so I don’t know how well they behave or how the setup is.

You could easily run a VM with KVM with the specs you listed. Personally I find the installation of KVM and Windows VM creation a bit convoluted, but there are great tutorials availiable online and it’s a one-time ordeal of maybe 15-45 minutes (including VM creation, depending on how fast you want to go/how familiar with the Linux command line you are), so not that bad. Utilizing virt-manager limits command line use to just the first setup of KVM. Installing the VM can be done graphically using virt-manager.

I don’t know how drawing tablet passthrough compatibility in KVM is (probably great though). RedHat drivers enable shared clipboard and dragging files over between the host and VM, so even that should be quite painless if you choose to go the VM route.

No distro can just do that.

Try crossover, which is said to have best Windows app support. But Microsoft is actively fighting it, on their apps.

Your school is very, very, very shitty.

So I’m confused. Wouldn’t you want Windows? Also outlook can be replaced by Thunderbird.

So basically I see two options. First, if your device has 4 or more cores and 16gb of ram you can run Windows in KVM. If that isn’t the case you need to pickup another device or not use Linux.