The reality that OpenOffice is dead since a decade aside and you only want to try it for experiment reasons and not for actually using it: What happens instead? Do you get any error messages? Try running it from a shell and see if you get any useful output.
Nothing beats the Arch wiki, to be honest. One of the best and broadest collections of useful information around the web. And since Arch is not-too-modified in relation to upstream, all of the information is usable for most a lot of other distributions, too.
And yes: I’m using Arch, btw.
To be more specific: I’m running Arch with Hyprland (a tiling compositor for Wayland) on my DELL XPS 13 without any issues, running Arch with Openbox (X11) on my main computer since over a decade without any major issues (device is used for gaming, multimedia, video and image editing and screen recording), and on all devices I serve something from.
Since I run Arch as a server (had it as communication server, as DHCP/DNS server, as VPN endpoint on a Raspberry Pi, and as a gaming server, currently on my main server it’s used as host for a Docker setup), I can tell you, you don’t need to worry about any real issues regarding stability and performance. Arch is way less bleeding edge as non-Arch users think. Just update regularly every 2-3 weeks at least, and check the news before doing so.
I’m curious to hear about your experiences and recommendations!
It boils down to what effort you want to put into it.
If university and work usage is mainly running productivity stuff like some type of text processing or using web-based applications you likely won’t ever have any issues. If you’re constantly switching environments, need to run specific apps (maybe even 32-bit software), constantly use different video outputs, tons of different BT devices, etc. … well … Arch is of course capable of everything the bigger distributions have to offer by default (all the nice “magic” stuff that happens automatically in the background), you just need to set everything up by yourself.
I might be biased towards Arch, but maybe just try if it fits your intended purpose and if you’re willing to set up everything at least once before using it.
I’m running Hyprland on my Intel laptop without any issues (but I’m doing not much multimedia on it). But on my Nvidia desktop, oh no. Screen recording is flakey (especially with multiple sources and audio recording to different channels) in OBS, video editing impossible due to heavy UI flickering, gaming has worse performance, watching YouTube has noticable lag.
For just opening your browser and doing non-multimedia stuff it’s fine I guess.
You should try Linux Mint. It’s a good distribution for new Linux users. It’s easy to understand, has a good community with plenty of solutions for all types of problems and it is not too specific.
Gaming with Steam on Linux works without any major issues except when it comes to games that intentionally made run on Windows only due to their DRM. I suggest using the Flatpak variant of Steam so you won’t clutter your system with too many weird dependencies.
I remember years ago it already was like this in the forums. It actually made me stop using it and running a custom made web based reader for some time.
I wouldn’t use it anymore nowadays.
FreshRSS is the way to go. It even has plugins (and a plugin for YouTube channels as RSS feeds, very convenient).