Any distro you’d like. Use the office / outlook stuff in a browser. I believe kde has a way to use onedrive in dolphin, though personally I would keep my data on my computer unless it is for a group project, just make sure it’s backed up. I’d also have a VM handy with the spice guest tools. It is good to have at least for when you have to hand your computer to someone who may be uncomfortable with linux. I would use debian on a school computer for the ludicrous stability, but use whatever floats your boat.

I use the web version of all O365 apps, even Teams, and I also have a Windows VM in case I need the desktop apps for whatever reason.

For teams specifically I’m just using the web version with chromium. Installed as a chromium app so I have quick access to it and have it on my taskbar. Rest of Office 365 works just fine in any browser. (Outlook, SharePoint, Power apps etc) For OneDrive Sync you can use https://abraunegg.github.io/ which should work on most distros.

You can run teams in linux. I don’t know if the same goes for Outlook, but I found that accessing the web version via portal.office.com was sufficient.

When I had to use Office and LibreOffice wasn’t sufficient, I just had a Windows VM running. The web versions are hot garbage (or at least used to be 3 years ago and I doubt that’s changed). I’m not sure if there’s a direct way to mount OneDrive on Linux (rclone maybe?) but if there isn’t you could do that via a network share over the VM.

KMail can connect to Exchange mailboxes. KOrganizer might even be able to access the calendar from one, I don’t remember.

Micro$oft loves Open-source… Well, … not unless they need to support it, instead of ripper off all the open-source developers.

Personally, I’ve had no problems whatsoever running the Office 365 apps needed by my school on Debian’s version of Firefox ESR. Aside from Outlook and Teams, I’m not asked to use them very often, as most assignments are turned in as PDFs, but when I have been required to use Word and Excel, I have had no problems.

Apparently GNOME 46 introduced support for Microsoft 365 accounts including OneDrive support in the file manager, so a distro that runs a recent GNOME version, such as Fedora or Ubuntu, may be your best option. But without that, you can still use a third-party project like onedriver or abraunegg’s OneDrive client.

As most others said, pretty much any distro is fine. You have a powerhouse of a laptop, so running a Windows VM inside of KVM would pose no problem, but if you can, I’d advise to try avoiding a VM.

Teams is basically just a web app masquerading as a classic application using Electron, so you can just use Teams inside of your browser of choice with minimal features missing (the only one I noticed was green-screen, but I didn’t care that much about it).

Even if you use a lot of Office, you’d be surprised at how similar LibreOffice is to MS Office. The UI is a lot worse IMO, but 99% of the features are there. Tables in Word/Writer seem to behave quite a bit differently for one which can get annoying, along with the usual problems of switching from one UI to another. As for formats, LibreOffice supports MS Office extensions. There are some differences in rendering because of what I see as MS bullshit, but it’s limited to padding, font size, etc. (and missing fonts), but if your teachers are open to it you can easily send them the original as well as a PDF reference just in case.

I didn’t use Office web apps for a few years now, but when I did they were missing a lot of features (more than 80% i’d say), but others say the situation has improved, so you can try that in your browser of choice like Teams.

If you need the desktop Office apps, you maybe could use Wine or something to run them on Linux, but I don’t have any experience with that so I don’t know how well they behave or how the setup is.

You could easily run a VM with KVM with the specs you listed. Personally I find the installation of KVM and Windows VM creation a bit convoluted, but there are great tutorials availiable online and it’s a one-time ordeal of maybe 15-45 minutes (including VM creation, depending on how fast you want to go/how familiar with the Linux command line you are), so not that bad. Utilizing virt-manager limits command line use to just the first setup of KVM. Installing the VM can be done graphically using virt-manager.

I don’t know how drawing tablet passthrough compatibility in KVM is (probably great though). RedHat drivers enable shared clipboard and dragging files over between the host and VM, so even that should be quite painless if you choose to go the VM route.

Any distro should work just fine, so the typical three: Debian, Fedora, Arch, or something else. Gnome 46 supposedly added support for Microsoft accounts as well as onedrive in the Nautilus file manager, so you should be able to “store all of your data.”

Any distro.

Use a Windows VM for things that are unavailable or don’t work well as a web app. The absolute easiest way to run a Windows VM is VMware Player especially if you use a stable OS like Debian or Ubuntu LTS. The built-in KVM hypervisor works fine too but it requires more work to setup a Windows VM with all the drivers, shared folder, etc. And it won’t have graphics acceleration of any sort. With that said I’ve personally migrated from VMware to KVM in anticipation that Broadcom who recently purchased VMware will turn their software to shit or start asking for more money, or both.

From all the comments it looks like it’s quite a challenge to go native Linux.

One option, run a VM using KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine, native to some distros).

You can install Windows IOT LTSC (Long-term Servicing Channel), which receives only security updates 2x/year, no others. It also doesn’t have all the bloat. It’s what I run for daily use.

Win10 LTSC. It gets updates 2x/year, has very minimal bloat.

Windows LTSC Downloads, don’t forget to grab the key.

Then get O&O Shutup to reduce bloat even more (mostly just to limit telemetry on Windows).

And you can permanently license it using Microsoft’s own scripts. - Scripts on Github.

At one time you could directly launch apps in VMs using SeamlessRDP, I’m not sure if that still works or if there’s something new.

As others have said, wtf is wrong with the school requiring OneDrive?

Office won’t run on Linux or through Wine (AFAIK), I’ve converted to using LibreOffice on both Linux and Windows, which has yet to give me any issues.

Teams, as part of O365, also doesn’t have a Linux app, however… with the (paid) Thunderbird addon Owl for Exchange, you can read+send Outlook emails; it also adds a Teams icon to your Thunderbird sidebar that acts as a link to the web client.

Thunderbird, by default, can only read from Exchange mailboxes, but can’t send from them. If you don’t want to pay, the developers are working to add full Exchange support as stock. (There are also less legitimate ways to get Exchange support, like cracking Owl, but out of respect for the addon dev, you’ll have to find it yourself)

Edit:

If you’re new to Linux as a whole, I’ve seen many recommendations for Mint (a Debian and Ubuntu derivative), but I’ve never tried it myself. I started with Debian since I wanted a stable system that wouldn’t break down by itself or something. It’s rock solid on my Framework 13 Ryzen.

As for a Desktop Environment (DE), you can’t go wrong with GNOME or KDE. I prefer KDE since I don’t like the “look” of GNOME and it’s more “Windows-like” (but still it’s own thing), but it’s really just personal preference.

No distro can just do that.

Try crossover, which is said to have best Windows app support. But Microsoft is actively fighting it, on their apps.

Your school is very, very, very shitty.

Any distro that can run Chromium / Chrome. And everything other than Teams will work even on Firefox.

Office 365 runs out of the box on Crossover.