So, at school we use the whole Office 365 suite for a myriad of tasks.
Teams is used as the main way to share exercises and lesson material, Outlook is used as the resident email service, and you’re expected to use OneDrive to store all/most of your data. There are some additional apps that require Windows, but beyond the office 365 suite they are all replaceable.
What I’m wondering is, what distro can run/access those apps without too much hassle and set-up?
I’m looking to do this on a HP probook x360, upgraded to 32 GB of ram. The only peripheral of note I’ve got is a Ugee drawing tablet, but I can use the openTabletDriver or their own on some distro’s.
Microsoft supports Ubuntu LTS for their employees, and more recently RHEL. Not my first choices, but in particular you’ll see stuff like AAD auth on Azure VPN supported on Ubuntu LTS. There will also be some work going into proper Intune support, if that matters.
I would prefer Fedora or Debian for a more stable environment, and use Arch at home, but we have to keep interoperability in mind sometimes.
Another thing to look into, and I really hate to since Broadcom bought them, but you can run Windows inside VMWare, and use unity mode to break individual windows out into your DE. Beware of the new licensing.
Why wouldn’t you use KVM?
It really depends, but generally, I want to use as much Linux as possible, and for me a bigger part of that is the UI than the hypervisor.
I found that Virtual manager and gnome boxes are both solid from a UI perspective. The big upside is that you don’t need to install a bunch of extra stuff. They are easy to install and setup and it is smooth sailing one you setup the guest
But they don’t break windows from within the guest, into the host desktop environment. You see the entire desktop as a container.
That’s the nice part. You get a shared clipboard and autoresize so you can use it like a regular app.