> absolutely relies on Office

You mean "absolutely relies on being able to work with Office formats". Which most Linux distros do well out of the box. I'm not aware of any feature that LO doesn't support, although admittedly I usually exchange PDFs.

> Citavi

According to the WineDB page for Citavi:, "native Linux alternatives include: - BibSonomy / PUMA - JabRef - Mendeley - Zotero - Colwiz"

Of course when going through education you don't want to take risks, there is a lot on the line. But it may be worth to play with the alternatives a bit, albeit on a VM or something. Of course maybe the Citavi format needs to be exchanged; that could actually be a problem. Annoying.