Avoid Manjaro, if you plan on entering the ArchLinux space do it with EndeavourOS.

I would avoid Ubuntu, but that is more because I dislike their politics on snaps.

You are an entry-level IT pro, so, I’d suggest EndeavourOS for personal, Debian for work. Why? Simple, Debian is widely used in professional environments, nobody will look at you weird for using a “less professional” distro.

In terms of University work, you are saying you guys use Teams and Office, probably with a student license that would give you access to a full online Office experience through the browser, just use that.

In terms of gaming, things are looking pretty good nowadays, and with a more personal distro, such as EndeavourOS, you’ll get the latest advancements in gaming.

For distros I’ve been mainly looking at Manjaro, Linux Mint or plain old Ubuntu. Can you recommend anything that might fit for me or will I maybe run into any issues with my chosen three?

Like others I would caution against Manjaro, the distro maintainers have shown on multiple occasions that they are not exactly on top of it all.

Ubuntu derivatives are typically great works-out-of-the-box distros. Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) has made a number of questionable moves with Ubuntu over the years so I would rather suggest going for Linux Mint instead. Mint is based on Ubuntu but IMHO fixes most of these issues.

My main concerns for switching are that I’ll have a hard time with university work because we mostly use teams for video conferences and work together with word, and other office stuff.

Since Microsoft Teams is an electron app, it works very well as a web app in a chromium-based browser like Brave or chromium itself, there’s no real need to install any separate app. I use it daily that way and I have no issues either with screen sharing, videoconferencing or chat.

Microsoft office is a tougher nut. LibreOffice may or may not work for you - there’s a good chance it won’t be 100% compatible with existing office documents, and may for example slightly change pre-existing formatting. If that doesn’t matter to you, LibreOffice could be completely fine as a replacement. Otherwise, Microsoft Office 365 in the browser works as well on Linux as on Windows, maybe try if that is a workable solution for you in most cases. I find that for me, the web version goes 95% of the way, and for the last 5% I keep a windows 10 VM with Office installed around.

We also are required to do some virtual machine stuff where we use virtualbox.

The de facto standard virtualization solution on Linux is KVM/QEMU, but Virtualbox does appear to exist for Linux, so I don’t see a blocker there.

Also I’m a bit worried that some games on uplay, epic and other platforms aren’t available anymore.

I don’t play much, but I don’t think there’s a good solution to that. Setting up non-Steam gaming setups on Linux (e.g. via Bottles or Lutris) is IMHO finicky at best. Also, AFAIK a number of online multiplayer games don’t work simply because the DRM software refuses to work on Linux. You can check ProtonDB for a database of games and their support on Linux. If there are blockers there, maybe consider a dual-boot setup.

If you don’t have the newest hardware i would also recommend Mint. I believe is the most friendly to windows users plus is Ubuntu based so there’s pretty much anything available to it, and lots of support if needed. Nothing of the software you mention seems like a problem since everything is available or runs in the browser.

Remember to enable proton for all games in the steam settings so that you can run your entire library.

If you en up using a local office suite I would instead of LibreOffice recommend Onlyoffice, in my experience has better compatibility with the ms office formats. You can keep both installed, that’s what I do.

Teams I haven’t used but there’s a flatpak available I believe, so I think it shouldn’t be a problem, or you can run it in the browser.

If you have newish hardware then maybe fedora will be a better option, probably the kde spin. Everything else is the same, just with fedora is indispensable to use the rpm fusion repositories.

Linux Mint is great, Ubuntu is ok, I’d stay away from Manjaro. The Manjaro team is known for selectively delaying updates, which can break systems sometimes.

Teams and VirtualBox both work fine on Linux, though personally I’d recommend just using teams in the browser vs downloading the app from Microsoft.

Most games work great on Linux! A really good resource for seeing if the game you want to play works is ProtonDB. There’s a compatibility rating for almost every game on Steam there (even if you didn’t buy the game on Steam, ratings for the Steam version should be fairly accurate). For non-steam games, WineHQ AppDB is another good resource, though I’ve found it can sometimes be a bit out of date when it comes to compatibility (in a good way, it’ll say games are broken sometimes when they actually work fine).

For Epic, you can use the Heroic Games Launcher. It’s an open-source launcher for Epic and GOG games. It’ll automatically handle setting up a wine prefix for you and everything, so all you should need to do is click “install” and then “play” once it’s done. Uplay is a bit more difficult, since there’s no Linux-native launcher, but it’s not impossible. I believe Lutris has an installer for it, you can definitely find instructions on how to do this online.

I’m not gonna lie and say that gaming on Linux is as easy as it is on Windows, especially for a beginner. These games and apps were designed for use on Windows, and if any consideration was given for Linux, it was an afterthought. However, it’s completely possible for many people to never have to use Windows for gaming. It’s so, sooooo much better than it was just a few years ago, and it’s only going to improve from here. You might struggle a bit as a beginner, but with time you’ll learn more about how all this stuff works and eventually, if a game doesn’t work, in most cases you’ll be able to figure out why and fix it.

Personally, I can’t remember the last time I just wasn’t able to get a game running on Linux at all. There was like, one instance where cutscenes didn’t work, that’s the worst case I’ve ever encountered. I mostly stick to single-player games, but still.

As an engineer with years of experience in tech with more in kernel engineering there is only one distro you should use.

The one you like! Debian is great, solid, with a major market share in servers and cloud infra, with a lot of great distros broken from it for consumer use. RHEL distros are great as well but not that practice for personal use imo.

Pick something like Pop or Ubuntu for daily use and then get docker to play with other more cloud infra distros like ubuntu server, centos, aml, and get web services running through those if you want to expand your knowledge.

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Between the three I’d go for Linux Mint. It was my first distro too, and it makes the setup process very easy, especially for users coming from Windows. Manjaro and Ubuntu are fine, plenty of people I know love them, but they’ve both made some decisions in recent years that I don’t like. The former being negligent with security updates, and the latter forcing their own, worse, package manager on users. You shouldn’t have any issues with Mint.

Most of the apps you mentioned are available for Linux, including Teams and VirtualBox, though you’ll probably have to download those from their respective websites. Office 365 still works from a web browser, and you can open its documents locally with LibreOffice (though more complicated documents might have some formatting messed up). I haven’t heard of uPlay, but there is an unofficial Linux client for Epic Games (called Heroic Launcher), and ~90% of Windows games either support Linux or work through a compatibility layer such as Proton.

Zorin is great! but, if gaming is really important i’d recommend dual booting so you can switch back and forth. eventually you will just let your windows os collect dust

As long as you are okay with using the web versions of office, you can basically go with any distro, since all of them have at least a web browser and virtualbox in their repositories, as well as vs code. Jetbrains also works (I’ve only used intellij but I assume the others are just as easy to set up). I’ve never tried visual studio on linux though, not sure how well that works.

Clear Linux looks very performant which is interesting for gaming. And it provides choice between DEs !

I second everyone else dont use manjaro. As someone who was in a similar position to you, I started with mint just to toy around with it. Personally I’d recommended fedora, or Ubuntu (fedora over Ubuntu). I didnt stick with mint long though, eventually I just took the deep dive and installed arch as my daily driver which I wouldnt recommend unless you have time and energy to tinker with what us broken. If your uncomfortable with using Linux full time try duel booting that way you have windows as a back up system in case you bork something. If you have any questions feel free to DM me. And remember flatpak is the linux beginners best friend.

For the university work you could try libreoffice, it works on windows too if would like to try, Epic games work through Heroic games launcher or the Epic games launcher trough wine. Please do not use Manjaro as your starter distro, it’s very unstable, Ubuntu is not your best option, Linux mint might be the way to go if you want something simple. You could try out fedora workstation, or fedora kde spin, it’s great, only remember to use flatpak for your multimedia apps.

Fedora KDE spin or OpenSUSE.

As for Office, you’ll need to use the browser version or use a VM (or container or whatever). Besides that, you can expect like 90% of games to run either via Lutris or by adding them to Steam.

If you want to play around, I recomend to try Garuda Linux Dr460nized Gaming. Yes, it is very bloated and has a very gamery aesthetic, but it comes with a lot of cool software and customizations to explore. I recently started to recreate what I like about it on EndeavourOS and it’s a very good learning exercise :)

I’d go with MX/Xfce, it’s based on Debian. Once system is installed you’ll not see a big diff between a MX/Xfce and a Manjaro/Xfce, visually, but under the hood they are completely different for instance.

Want to install xrdp to access your PC from windows RDP client? In Manjaro you have to enable AUR, download the source and compile them, it’s missing all kind of base-development that you need to install, then at the end you have to tinker some config file or your screen is black, etc. In MX, it just work fine.

So try something that works fine first, like MX23 AHS version.