

The downside is, you will be spending a lot of time customizing your Linux and fixing problems. This can be very rewarding and a great learning experience but it also takes time and effort. If you want to spend less time with your computer and more time talking to people offline or enjoying nature, installing Linux can be a bad idea.
When I was studying computer science I had a dual-boot setup on my laptop. I was never happy with a VM but it’s not a lot of work to set up so you could try that first! With dual-boot I could still use Windows if I absolutely needed it for a course. I can recommend the Arch Linux wiki, it has many articles and tutorials. It’s only really useful if you are using Arch Linux or a distro based on Arch, e.g. EndeavourOS