You're as prepared as anyone ever is. Getting good with a search engine is the best preparation.

Also, if that fails? Most distros have a forum where you can ask for help and actually get it.

Document interoperability? LibreOffice works well, and you can save in all the same formats as MS Office and more.

The learning curve is mostly what the new tools and programs are called. But so much stuff actually works better over there in Linux land - VLC, Krita, Blender, Audacity, much more.

Try things in a Virtual Machine! If you really can't give up some of your windows tools, you can try dual-booting, but Windows Update doesn't always play nice with another OS on the machine.

Depends. If you use Google docs or the browser version of Office 365 (or whatever it's called now) you'll be fine. If you want to use an offline document editor, you'll need to be technical enough to understand the difference between file formats like doc, odf and pdf.

If you receive a doc file, edit it in LibreOffice and send it back, the recipient might complain that the layout has shifted slightly.

If you need to be absolutely sure the recipient gets the document layed out exactly as you created it and they don't need to edit it, exporting to pdf is a good option.

If you need to send or receive Excel/spreadsheet files you might have a bad time, I think. Though interoperability there may have improved since the last time I tried that sort of thing.

Before switching to Linux, download the Windows/Mac version of LibreOffice or OnlyOffice and see if it suits your needs. If not, it should be possible to run Office 365 on Linux using Wine or Winboat. However, Wine might not work or require too much tinkering for the average noob. Winboat should be more foolproof, but will increase the startup time of the application because you're running it inside a Windows VM.

You can try out most Linux software immediately on Windows, so you know what you're in for. LibreOffice and GIMP work in Windows, but that isn't really true the other way around with Office and Photoshop. Your mileage may vary when it comes to tolerating these alternatives.

It depends. If you get a Laptop that is specifically compatible with Linux (like a Lenovo) and use a "noobie Distro" (like I do (Linux Mint or Fedora, whichever looks nicer to you)) then you're fine

If you use a Laptop which is not compatible, you're going to have a very bad time

Your technical knowledge as described is unironically far beyond the average user so I'd say you're probably good. Depends on what you want to do though. You can occasionally have problems if you need to do something specific or are married to software that doesn't exist on Linux. Word processing is down pat. You won't have the app version of Microsoft Office, but there are open source alternatives like LibreOffice that are compatible with Office file types. For formatting, you may have to download some Microsoft owned fonts since they're technically proprietary and not bundled with Linux/your office suite. In browser, Microsoft 365 and Google Docs works no differently than normal.

As someone else mentioned, you can test almost any distro on a live USB. There is also this site where you can remote in and test the general look and feel for free. You won't have an internet connection though:

https://distrosea.com/

Installing something like Linux Mint or Ubuntu is fairly easy. The hardest part is probably creating the install media and that's not particularly hard ei her.

If you don't rely on specific software (like Adobe), using Linux is a good idea. I'd still advice not to mess with a computer you rely on and wait until you have sufficient time to troubleshoot something. Even if nothing goes wrong a new OS can still take a little getting used to.

who absolutely needs to send documents successfully to others

While the problem is Micro$lop intentionally not following their own document standard, i'd say wait until you finish your degree.
Generally speaking though, unless you ave very specific needs, you'll most likely do fine with linux. You can try a liveUSB version: boot it of off a USB drive, test it, without installing (it'll be slower though).

your level of technical knowledge is so far beyond the average person's that it's insane. the idea of 'my computer has a problem, i'm going to google what the popup says' simply does not occur to so, so many people.

You're exactly at the perfect level to start getting your feet wet without losing productive time (as long as you don't go on a distro-hop frenzy 🤣).

Weirdly enough, you're way ahead of 99% of the tech-using population worldwide.

I think you'll be OK but there will be a slightly learning curve since it is a different OS. As for documents make sure they work well with either LibreOffice or OnlyOffice, which should be available on other OSes. There are also always online office suites if needed.

If you have a spare flash drive, you can also test out Linux distros (flavors) before installing them in a live mode, like a demo.

Best of luck.

Try with a VM first, or install on an external drive and boot from USB.

I got a Mac at work and I struggled for a long time to do many basic things. Any change can be a challenge and there's a learning curve. Same moving to Linux

Not gonna lie, Linux is a pretty big learning curve, but it's worth it to get away from Apple and (especially) Microslop Winblows. It's the only OS that respects the user.

If your computer has 4+ cores/threads and 8GB or more of ram, I'd set up a virtual machine to test it out.

Linux itself works just fine for anything, but it's different. There's a learning curve and you might find that the thing you need to do immediately has a different process than what you're used to, or needs some setting up first. There's also always formatting differences between word and libreoffice writer (same can be said for different versions of word), and some higher level excel things that aren't easy or not possible in calc.

You should be fine if it's just messing with the usual document types but my understanding is universities use a lot of proprietary bullshit for homework and stuff these days that probably doesn't play well with Linux. I would try setting up a virtual machine or a old PC if you have one first to dip your toes in the water

If you know what a driver and device manager is and know how to Google search you are already leagues ahead of most ordinary people, especially with AI now getting answers is even easier, if your use case is simple student stuff and sending documents, Linux is gonna be very comfortable for that, the only concern is a minor chance of driver issues for something like biometric sensor or graphics cards on laptops, for that you can look up which distro and driver combo works for your specific hardware, but in my experience these days by and large most Linux distro just work out of the box with mordern hardware, you can test one out before installing with a live USB and if you want the most amount of compatibility but a laptop that comes pre installed with Linux or has the option of Linux provided by the manufacturer as that guarantees the hardware plays nice at least with the distro the manufacturer supports