Ok Here was the deal for me. I put three daughters through college, my last one graduated 4 years ago. I was a tenured full professor of Computer Science for over 12 years.

I used ubuntu linux on all of their notebooks. Why because I got sick of virus software expiring or they not downloading the updates when I told them to ... or the tons of malware and other such nonsense a college kid deals with. Now once I got them to use linux and the open office programs, and to save their files in open office as either PDF or microsoft word docs as required by their professors, my kids found it easy to use, and 100% reliable. Now did they do all kinds of games on it, No .. could they do 100% of their needed course work yup .. That is the path I took ... worked great for me.