> absolutely relies on Office

You mean "absolutely relies on being able to work with Office formats". Which most Linux distros do well out of the box. I'm not aware of any feature that LO doesn't support, although admittedly I usually exchange PDFs.

> Citavi

According to the WineDB page for Citavi:, "native Linux alternatives include: - BibSonomy / PUMA - JabRef - Mendeley - Zotero - Colwiz"

Of course when going through education you don't want to take risks, there is a lot on the line. But it may be worth to play with the alternatives a bit, albeit on a VM or something. Of course maybe the Citavi format needs to be exchanged; that could actually be a problem. Annoying.

Ubuntu. Pay close attention; the normal Ubuntu is what I consider beta. The Long-Term-Support (LTS) variants of Ubuntu is what I consider the normal Ubuntu, which should always be used except maybe when working on Ubuntu components as a developer. This will save you a lot of pain down the road.

Probably Manjaro or Ubuntu.

And in my experience, nothing “just works”.

The single stupidest thing people new to linux do is try to install it on random hardware and expect it to just work. Mac has the hardware idea right where all of their hardware is thoroughly vetted against their OS so practically no one runs into issues. To get something similar on Linux you'd need to buy from a vendor that offers their OS preloaded with Linux. Kubuntu Focus, System76, Tuxedo, are the ones that focus on Linux and Framework, Lenovo, and Dell offer linux as an option and at least support it.

LTSC. Technically MSFT doesn’t offer them to laymen like us but I don’t think they would care if you pirate them.

This worked for me to switch to Extended Security Updates (ESU): https://github.com/abbodi1406/ConsumerESU

massgrave. Even Microsoft support uses that script

The only Hard requirements are a CPU with SSE 4.2 and POPCNT. Win11 will simply not install on older CPUs. The rest of the requirements can be bypassed but Microsoft will block you from the annual major feature upgrades. You will have to do those manually too. They also claim that your stability and performance on pre-8th Gen CPUs will be degraded and they will give no support, but in reality it runs just fine. Win11 is sluggish on all CPUs anyway.

Win11 was released at the end of 2021. What were you running for 6?