I’m a bit like you! I’m studying to become a High School science teacher, so I’m not in a technical program. My computer serves mostly as a typing machine. I switched 2 years ago and it wasn’t all smooth, but I’ll share some of the things I encountered and what I did.

First problem I had, cloud sync. I used to be a a big OneDrive user and I wanted to sync everything with my drive as I used to be. There isn’t a very good program for syncing OneDrive. I bought a licence to InSync and it made it work flawlessly. Seriously good software! (nowadays I host my own Nextcloud server, but don’t start with that, it’s a lot of job for not a whole lot).

Second problem was getting used to LibreOffice. Compared to Office, LO isn’t formated around pages, every text you write is considered “one big text” and then it calculates where to put its page breaks and everything. What does it change? Not a whole lot, but technically speaking, it’s not as good as a formatting tool as Word is. Doesn’t really matter if you aren’t a formatting freak like I am, but it took me a some time to get use to it. To get better with it, I recommend you to practice styles on it (text style and page style).

Third problem, collaboration. I didn’t find a very good solution to it. What I do is I ask all my colleagues to write their parts online (Google Docs, MS Office Online,…) then once everything is done and perfectly written, I download it and open it in LO and do the final formatting. So I’m always the one doing the formatting. It’s important than when you give it back to your teachers, give it in a .PDF format. (Btw, unrelated, but look into Zotero, it’s a life saver)

And a general tip and trick I could give you is to keep close a Windows/Mac machine (not with you at all times, but just something you access fairly easily if you plan in advance). There were a few times a professor mandated that we submitted the work in MS office format, and I didn’t want to risk it not being right, so I did it in LO and polished it in Office. That and I was asked to use a very specific, Windows only software, so having it was very useful.

If you have other questions, don’t hesitate to ask!

To add more info then the other comments, this error message seems to indicate that the name of the file is too long or contains invalid characters. In your case, that might be the “.pages.pdf” (the double dots) I would personally try to write only “.pdf”.

After a bit of googling, it seems that another reason might be that Apple be Apple. In other words, there seems to be a long, unresolved bug with the smb client in the native apps that bugs out when the smb server is on Linux (and sometimes even if it’s on Windows…). One of the solutions mentioned was to use another file manager app.

Now, I do get that, sometimes, error messages are very useless (looking at you “An error occurred”…), but this one is actually pretty self explanatory… A bit of googling before just posting about your problem. And another thing that’s generally appreciated is to write what you tried to do to solve the problem. And btw, this doesn’t seem to be a Linux problem, more of an Apple one, so you should post it on that Community instead of c/Linux.

I use Mate everyday, it’s my DE (Desktop Environment) of choice. I’ve used it through Ubuntu Mate and Opensuse. There’s a huge difference between the two. The difference is, since the main developer of the Mate DE is the main developer of Ubuntu Mate, the experience is noticeably better there. Ubuntu has its flaws, but it’s a fairly good all rounder.

Just on a side note, Mate is one of the most “Linux looking” DE. Which is cool since it’s different and shows you a different (and in my opinion, more efficient) way to work! But if you want something Windows looking, well it’s quite different. If you need light weight and windows looking, look for Lubuntu (or any distro with the LXQT DE)!