This is my third attempt. Partly to rage quit Windows, and partly to gain utility and control with some professional AV software.
I have converted an old Asus netbook to Ubuntu netbook remix and used it for a while. I was impressed with how much better that tiny thing ran with Linux than Windows. But in the end it still had less power than a TI-84. So I stopped using it, and never really learned Linux proper.
I dual boot my Chromebook, so I can use gimp for photos on vacation, but everything I do with the Linux partition is cut and paste from articles by people who know what they’re doing. (I was motivated to post here by a meme about that.)
I’m thinking of dual booting my main desktop, because I need Windows for some fairly processor intense A/V software I use for work. So what would be a good distro to look into for a novice and where should I look for a tutorial? I would ultimately like to see if I can use Linux to run my AV software in emulation and add drivers for some professional audio interfaces. I’m fed up with windows and trying to see how far I can get without it. Your help is appreciated in advance, and if this is inappropriate for this topic, let me know and I’ll delete it.
Would start off with linux mint cinnamon edition, imo it is the easiest way to transition to linux, and dont be afraid to play around with linux. Go make mistakes, it is the best way to learn from
I love when people switch on the same machine and experience a performance boost. They finally start to understand all my under breath muttering about hating windows and it’s geriatric bloatware.
Windows is a liability. I’m forced to use it because of the propriatary nature of the games (and tech) I play.
There is nothing awesome coming out of Microsoft.
Agreed, derivative me too stuff is what they’re doing. But then, with the world using Office, they don’t have to work too hard to keep the lights on and their bellies full.
Proton and steam work pretty great these days. Try it out.
RT isn’t available and few games using EAC still need support for Linux. Additionally Logitech headphones aren’t supported on Linux (proprietary drivers for virtual surround)
Besides that I’m very well aware of proton’s existence and I’m planning on building a new instance of Gentoo just for gaming.
I agree with the first sentence, but the second is wrong due to Proton, and the third is demonstrably wrong if you take a look at their GitHub. Windows Caldulator is better than anything Linux has, and WinGet is a decent attempt at making Windows finally have a native package manager.
WinGet even does manage packages like you’d expect when installing and uninstalling MSIX packages, and the ease of merely requesting manifests even beats the OBS.
Of course they’re making good software. Why wouldn’t they be? They’re a competent software development company that much of the world chooses to rely upon. There’s gonna be a reason for it. System admins on a whole generally aren’t totally stupid.
Even whilst Balmer was CEO, some under-the-hood Windows and Azure changes were quite impressive. He merely screwed up everything he was able to touch, which admittedly was an absolute tonne.
Especially when the potato laptop stops being so potato all of a sudden. It’s satisfying.
My wife and I have identical 7th gen i5 laptops, except hers has Windows while mine has Mint. I regularly use mine in front of the TV, and recently she tried to do the same. We had to turn the TV volume up and it took a minute to figure out why. The fans on her laptop were running flat out to keep it cool because Windows had so much going on in the background that the CPU was at 100%.
She was ready to scrap the laptop because it was so slow, thinking that it was normal.
Exactly, vindicating. Best example I have is my 72yr old mother, with her very old Celeron laptop that originally came with Win7, but Win10 has bogged down: stick in a current kubuntu usb live image usb and she doesn’t have time to make a cup of tea while it boots anymore. She won’t have to buy a new one anytime soon either…but an SSD upgrade may be a good idea.
Dual booting can be problematic. Windows is the most retarded OS ever which sometimes decides to overwrite boot partition.
FOr trying out stuff, you van install Linux as a virtual machine. Check there if your sw works there and is available.Absolutely! Dual booting on a work machine running AV software. Sounds like a nightmare just waiting to happen… It’ll break when you least expect it and your client is gonna flip shit.
VM is definitely the way to go. Give it max resources and run it full screen until you get a secondary tinkering tool or succumb to WSL
Once the opposite occurred to me. Fedora overwrote my Windows installation. Dual-booting isn’t safe.
Ugh, yeah. Dual booting is such a headache lol
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Ardour is another decent pick for DAW, though it was a little unstable when I used it ~5 years ago
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Reaper is on a line with ProTools and has a linux port. I never like Ardour. Too much fiddly stuff.
Ubuntu my dude. I started fiddling with it years ago and it’s my go to when I need a good desktop / gaming system. Any distro is gonna be a steep learning curve and a great way to go about it is to get a crapola system and start banging Linux on it. You’ll be frustrated and then search and find that there is a massive amount of community support for most distros. I use a Raspberry PI 4 running Ubuntu 64 for all my AV needs… Drives the projector and stereo and also serves as a retro gaming over the projector deal. We’re all fed up with windows.
My advice is to restart with Arch (I use Arch btw). Not Manjaro, I’m talking Arch.
I think using/installing Arch as well as its barebones nature FORCES you to understand how Linux works differently than Windows with concepts like root, bootloader, terminal emulation, and disk partitioning, just to give you some examples. At the same time, Arch has excellent documentation, a great package manager in pacman, and rolling release model that greatly simplifies maintainance during daily use so you can tune it to exactly how you want it.
I believe doing it the hard way at first will make it easier for you in the long run if you really want to understand Linux, and Arch is just the right amount of difficult to make you learn Linux, whereas Gentoo would be too hard and you don’t learn enough from using Ubuntu/Debian/Mint.
But yeah, if you just want to use something that works well out of the box, then Ubuntu is great, there’s nothing wrong with using the more user friendly distros.
I tried that after already having about 2 years experience with Ubuntu desktop and an Ubuntu server (but still mostly a Windows user). I’m also a software developer.
And I failed to install Arch on a laptop the last time I tried it out. Ubuntu ran flawlessly, trying to go step by step through the Arch installation I hit a random error (at a step that was very straight forward and easy in the documentation) and got stuck. Messed around with it and at some point gave up.
I mean that’s years ago, it probably works a lot better nowadays and especially on more modern hardware, but even so for someone new to Linux I’d never tell them to go with a do-it-yourself install. Slap Ubuntu on that bad boy, let them install a few packages, do a handful of terminal commands and they’ll get much farther. Instead of giving up three hours in because a random command (that they still don’t understand) is broken.
If you look at the original post, his goal is to learn and understand Linux and he is on his third attempt after already trying Ubuntu remix, which is why I made this suggestion.
Again, if he just wanted to use Linux on his computer, then there is nothing wrong with using a more user friendly distro at all. But for his particular needs he described, then Arch is a better distro for learning how Linux actually works.
But as OP said, they already failed several times. That’s like telling someone who nearly drowned in the shallow end of a pool to go jump into the ocean.
See here:
So what would be a good distro to look into for a novice and where should I look for a tutorial?
For me it feels like they do want to learn, but aren’t comfortable yet as a day to day user. They want to use Linux, but struggle with commands and how to use it. Having a stable and easy to use system you can use each day without trouble would probably be a better start than telling them to fiddle with Arch. Give them an easy distro and when they want to learn more they can use the crappy old laptop and try to install Arch on there (while leaving their daily driver alone).
I think I learned the most when using Ubuntu for school, 90% of it was easy and straight forward. 10% of it was hell, like back in the day getting HDMI or audio to work. But because the 90% were there I just dug in and spent a dozen hours to troubleshoot the rest.
Well, I think “drowning” could be a bit much. Don’t want to make Linux sound that scary now.
I think there is a reason why “Learning Python the Hard Way” is so popular, because although it’s harder, it leads to learning better fundamentals which makes things easier in the long run.
So, I think OP should still give Arch a try, maybe he (they?) will be more receptive to this method, and there’s no harm in trying.
I didn’t stick with Linux as a daily driver until I tried Manjaro. Learned enough to be comfortable installing Arch and ran that for a while, but after installing it a few times I was looking something a little bit simpler to setup. I now prefer EndeavourOS which is basically Arch with a nice installer and a few QoL apps.
I’m a long time Linux user but I’m really lazy. I recently installed Arch to try it out again as last time I did it was maybe 2012. Personally, manually setting up the hard drive partitions on initial install is just annoying enough to be too much work (I have a lot of drives) but luckily there’s an installer that does that part for you. Everything else you have to do is sensible and easy and actually ends up being less work in the long run. The wiki is also extremely informative, helpful and correct.
Arch probably can be a beginner distro just because if you have a problem it’s so much easier to find out how to fix it on the internet thanks to the wiki and the forums. Something as mundane as installing nvidia drivers in Debian can be a massive ordeal and the minimum required skill level to fix it yourself if it doesn’t work on the first attempt is very high.
Yea took me a while to understand that I need some drivers to install if I wanted to turn on hardware acceleration to watch videos on my computer.
Arch is amazing for all of these reasons, and I agree that by design it’ll give you a lot of insight in to what’s under the hood that most other distos tuck away.
I’ve used it in the past and ended up moving away from it because it requires quite a bit more effort to maintain, which got tiresome.
Arch has an active and dedicated community, so obviously there’s a whole lot of people out there who feel it’s worth the effort. Maybe OP will too. But it’s not a distro to take on lightly.
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That’s awesome! Are there any draw backs to the debian version? I feel like they’d just abandon Ubuntu if there was really no difference.
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Epic post, really good advice, MInt is the way to go IMO as well, the Xfce version is perfect for my needs and really stable, indeed having dabbled with linux for years this is the only version I have used for more than a year, actually just checked and I have been on mint now since 2020 with just the one upgraded installation. I actually duel boot but never actually boot into window for anything other than occasional work needs.
Being able to easily switch back to Windows hindered my attempt to learn Linux. When I wasn’t in the mood to learn a new concept, or failed to get something working after a few tries, then I’d just boot right back into Windows. I was able to push on when I deleted Windows in a rage and now the alternative to getting over the Linux hill was going back down and doing the “no, no, no, no, fuck off” dance that is the Windows install process.
Websites recommending Ubuntu to noobs didn’t help me much. The panel being stuck of the left size of the monitor after my friend boasted about customization on Linux really grinds my gears. Linux Mint was much better coming from Windows, and I’m still on it years later.
@tabular
@Andonyx
Agreed on all points, I didn’t end up finally switching to linux until I got so fed up with the auto update caused issue I was having that I just got rid of windows entirelyAnd while I at first switched to Ubuntu, I wouldn’t be happy until a few months later when I landed on fedora with KDE
Pop OS is a good beginner friendly Linux distro. Like Ubuntu, it is also debian based. This would make it easier to get used to for you since you have some experience with Ubuntu.
I’ve been really happy with Pop on my laptop. Tiling was a lot more useful than I expected, it’s nice being able to flip it on and off as needed.
Rather than trying to muck with dual booting, I would recommend picking up a Lenovo T430S or better laptop on Amazon from around 150.00-500.00. Lenovo ThinkPad T series laptops are incredibly well supported by Linux. Then install Linux Mint. This is a great way to get started with a low barrier to entry. As you get better, you can start tinkering with the innards. By getting a cheap spare machine with which to learn Linux on, it will be the least disruptive to you.
Second this best way to get started
This is what I did when I was getting started.
While this is a valid advice normally, OP has already tried this with Linux on a netbook and a dual boot chromebook. Since OP wants to do AV stuff it’s probably going to be a lot better experience with a desktop (assuming more capable than laptop) and monitor(s). Going another laptop route might be fine for learning but OP wants to switch and that’s not going to happen unless it’s on OP’s main rig.
My advice would be leave the windows installation alone and add a new drive (SSDs are pretty cheap these days) and install Linux on that. Use the BIOS to set the default drive to the new Linux drive and install and use Linux. You’ll have your windows install exactly how it is when you want to go back and just pick that as the boot device from the boot menu. Making Linux the default boot drive also helps with habit forming.
That’s a super solid alternative to running a VM ! Completely agree on this method, much more robust than dual booting on the same drive. Reading he’s planning on doing this to a work computer running AV software gave me pause
Kubuntu or Mint are great distro’s to begin with when starting your linux journey. It’s good to know down the road these should really be moved on from, but they’re great to get the ball rollin for sure!
Agree. Kubuntu is easy. Then you move on once you get going. Super easy.
What about them means that you should move on?
There’s a wide user base in mind with each, so rarely does anyone use all of the included packages. This could be defined as bloatware, plus proficiency in linux to me means anything can be done via terminal or GUI. The base distro’s have some task which require the terminal, while mint and kubuntu are managed via GUI.
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Not a pro take here … but when I was playing with various distros back in early 2001-03 I favoured Ubuntu, simply because it was the most user friendly (still have an old laptop duel-booted with it).
distrowatch.com is a good place to look around and check out what’s new and true to your needs.
The old-style web page is the same as it was in 2001; brings back good memories. :)
I really appreciate all the answers here so far. But I wanted to thank you for that resource specifically. Maybe my googling isn’t so great either, but I haven’t come across that before. Much obliged.
You’re very welcome. Glad I could help even a little. 👍
It’s not your fault, Google has become almost useless when it comes to things that aren’t commercial SEO optimized stuff. The course of popularity, I guess.
Just be aware of distrowatch rankings, they’re sorted by visits to the site, impressions and etc, and don’t necessarily reflect how much a distro is really widely used.
As others have said, if your device doesn’t have a Nvidia card, go with Linux Mint. If you do have a Nvidia card Fedora (maybe not the default GNOME version, as GNOME’s workflow required some time to get used to) or openSUSE might be better options.
If you’re okay with a distro installer asking a few more questions than the basic ones, and you don’t need super updated stuff, you can also try Debian.
Time to switch search engines
This except Ubuntu has fallen. Mint or PipOS are better now.
This may not work for everyone, but the only way to truly embrace Linux was to wipe the windows partition and start using Linux. That’s it, you no longer have to option to run back to your dual booted Windows if shit doesnt work. You sit down and figure it out.
My advice is, learning new things can be a pleasure, so try to improve your learning skills. Everything is possible then.
