I guess I’m smart enough to install opensuse, but dumb enough that I somehow got slow pacman.
I kid you not, on my hardware zypper is the fastest between ubuntu apt, fedora dnf, and arch pacman. dnf was the second-fastest on my hardware, with apt and pacman being pretty sluggish
I’ve also used portage which was even slower, but probably not a fair comparison considering how much more complex it is.
I had no issues with compatibility, just made sure to save documents to older microsoft office formats in the hopes of avoiding issues.
I never had to use an exam browser or anything like that, I’d imagine you’d want to have a polite conversation with the instructor if that were to occur, perhaps they can make an exception or allow you to do it on a library computer
Collaboration was always over google docs, so there were never any problems working with others. My CS classes were all expected to be done in Linux VMs so that was sort of ideal. Other science/humanities classes were totally software-agnostic.