Cornflake

If I was back in college and using Linux for the first time, I’d probably go with Fedora tbh. Arch is a pain in the rump for a first-time user and Fedora really is a “it just works” distro whilst still maintaining speed and keeping things up to date with it’s (more or less) rolling release schedule.

I didn’t use Linux in college, but I did use many FOSS tools. LibreOffice is easily my favorite office suite and there’s no contest. So long as you export your documents as .PDF or submit them as .DOCX, nobody is likely to know or even care what you used to type them.

This is likely to be similar for other types of software- as long as your finished product is compatible and looks good on the proprietary software, you shouldn’t run into any issues.

BTW, the university had student access for Microsoft Office. I could have chosen to use their tools at any time and I simply chose not to.