Linux

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.

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 would go from the bottom up instead of top down.

Make a list of software and tools you use, and search for functional Linux native equivalents. Then find the distro that supports up to date versions of that software (through flatpak or the package manager).

You can honestly do 100% of this without even touching the command line if you choose something user friendly like Mint, Pop OS, Ubuntu, or Fedora. Don’t fall into the rabbit hole of finding the perfect distro. Go from what you need to what supports it.

keep the windows partition around for a while until you are 100% confident you can fully make the switch.

General tips:

• Don't look for Linux versions of the Windows software you use. Instead look for software that fulfils the same purpose.
• If you're cutting-and-pasting a lot of stuff from those articles, give yourself a check on what those things actually do. See it as a small investment of time to economise time later on, as you'll rely less and less on those articles.
• Stick to popular distros. And for the desktop environment (DE), use whatever works for you.
• Keep it easy. It's fine if you need to log into Windows once in a while, but over time you'll notice yourself doing it less and less.

I'm a middle-aged truck driver. I've been using Linux Mint (Cinnamon) now for about seven years as my only operating system (without dual booting) since Windows XP Pro became totally obsolete. Granted, I'm a hobbyist programmer and lifelong computer enthusiast. However, there are definitely some easy to install and use distros out there these days.

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.

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.

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. :)

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!

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

Only one thing: never give up. You'll get things fixed by copy and paste until one day youll have a broken system and think wait I actually know how to fix this because I've been through it five times before.

First thing: Ubuntu is the right choice. As far as I’m aware, having run Linux as my main desktop OS for almost a decade and playing with several flavors (…which includes Arch btw 😎), it’s the most polished out of the box desktop experience for someone completely new. It will also likely be the OS with the most Q&A existing on the web for problems you won’t be the first to have encountered.

Secondly, and maybe this should be first, and it sounds like you’ve already got this part down: you have to want to do this. Linux is just not mainstream for the majority of desktop computer users. If you’re not really wanting to do this, you’ll be frustrated when this isn’t the same experience as Windows. (but it sounds like you’re sick of the Windows experience. That’s what started me into Linux years ago.)

Lastly, as far as my quick Lemmy comment goes: Embrace the terminal! You can get around for a while as a Linux n00b on Ubuntu without opening that terminal, but at the end of the day, the *nix shell commands are what make working with Linux great.

The switch will take time. You’ll occasionally need to look up how to do stuff that may have felt simple in Windows… and that will usually be installing and running software that targets Windows only. However, the support for that sort of stuff gets better and better with time. Wine🍷 has come a long way.

It’s worth the journey IMO. For me, I was a PC gamer and I jumped straight into Linux with 0 experience. I learned a lot, spending a lot of time trying to make my Windows games run on Linux. Friends at LAN parties would joke about how I’d spend half the LAN party trying to get my games to run right.

The jokes were a good laugh, but my career shifted since then and my Linux experience carried right over into software development. Everything I deploy is on Linux servers or in Docker containers. All those years fooling around and tinkering with Linux as a PC gamer were loading me with experience that people would pay me for one day.

Good luck! 🐧

You've had some good advice here already, all I'd add is that you should install the package tldr as it's a very noob-friendly accessible version of man pages (the manuals which come with every piece of software on Linux).

I would suggest Linux Mint Cinnamon. It's very Windows like, and just works. It's a great distro to get started. I started on it, and many others have. Non-techy relatives really took to it also.

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.

If you can, find another old computer that still works, maybe replace the mechanical hard drive with a solid state drive and install Linux Mint or even the new Debian 12. I have Debian running on an old computer with an Intel i5-2500k processor and it is rock solid. As far as learning linux, I recommend https://www.learnlinux.tv/ as a starting point. Jay is very good at explaining.

As an alternative (and since you need to keep Windows running for now), have you considered downloading VirtualBox and installing linux thee on your desktop? There's a couple of really good reasons behind this... First off, you don't have to mess with switching back and forth when dual-booting, but it also gives you the ability to play with some different distributions and find something that feels more comfortable without having to trash a machine and continuously starting over. You can even load up multiple distros at the same time on your Windows desktop and compare them.

Now for really getting going with linux... It's easier if you don't expect yourself to figure it all out at once. Pick a daily task, like reading your email. Maybe you already use something like Thunderbird, so that's an easy switch. Just shut it down on Windows and start using the linux screen for this every time. Web browsing might also be an easy switch, and you already mentioned you use Gimp. Have you played around with different desktops yet? With linux you can install several and select one of them when you log in, so maybe try KDE, Gnome, or Mate (this one is my favorite because it's fairly light on my older system but still lets me configure a lot). What else can you dive in to? How about configuring your login screen for different options like showing available users or automatically signing you in when you boot up the linux system in virtualbox? There's a lot of configuration you can do by editing files in the /etc/ folder so it pays to get familiar with that aspect of things.

Once you think maybe you found a distro or desktop you like, consider what other things you can do to really start getting familiar with linux. You could change your default shell, or your default command line editor. What about setting up a local DNS cache or maybe your own email relay? Maybe even set up your own web server and database, and use them to develop web pages locally. The point is, once you realize there's no limitations in what you now have available to you, your brain starts thinking about all the things you could do -- and that's where you really start learning how to work with linux. Sure you need to use online guides the first time you set up a web server or something else. Sure you'll have to continue to rely on the web for some time, but as you work through various projects you'll start to remember where you found things, and you'll start to see how they connect to other things, and one day that thing you've been re-typing from your notes suddenly clicks and you understand WHAT that thing was actually doing.

It's never an easy process to start something new. The first time somebody gave me a bunch of old PC parts and I powered up a machine on my waterbed, I looked at the blinking cursor and thought "now what?" (Yeah he didn't even give me a DOS boot floppy!) But here we are thirty-some years later and I'm running servers, troubleshooting multiple operating systems at work, and doing pretty much anything I want. Linux was a complete change of gears but it was totally worth taking the time to figure it out, you just need to work on one piece at a time.

Lol are you me?

I kept trying to run Linux and windows, both in dual-boot and separate system form, and always crutched my way back to windows. My largest excuse was gaming.

Once Valve proved gaming on Linux is possible via the Steam Deck, I was officially out of excuses. I formatted c: and installed Pop_OS and forced myself to learn it. The only thing I miss, and not even that much, is MS Office apps. There are perfectly serviceable productivity apps for Linux but none feel as comfortable (yet).

It’s been about a year, and I am finding myself copy/pasting a little less than at the beginning and becoming more comfortable and knowledgeable every day. Taking the nuclear option isn’t for everyone, but it worked for me.

Stick to the defaults for the time being and only do custom things when you have time to fiddle around. This is not specific to Linux though.

I'm far from experienced in this but from what I heard: Linux Mint.

Then libreoffice for office (I think it's pre installed on Linux Mint). See this https://youtu.be/4qWgrGc4g20

I dual boot Fedora and Windows on my PC, have had a good experience so far. I would say Fedora is beginner friendly and is a good choice for a distro, everything just works.

Start with something like Pop!_OS and learn by working out how you do all your daily tasks. Once you are competent with that, try tweaking a few things to run how you want, or try new technology. Enabling wayland for example. Then before you know it you'll have a large beard and preach the benefits of free software

Before I could fully leave windows, I spent a lot of time being lost in Linux distrohopping and ricing without even fully understanding what I was doing. Without a solid setup to live in, Linux had a weird experimental feel and it got frustrating when I wanted stuff done.

Coming to your case, there are 2 different priorities here: daily driving and Linux proficiency. You're tied into windows for the daily driving bit for now so your main focus should be learning, and that probably won't need a dual boot right away.

First up is understanding why there are so many distributions. Linux is the kernel, the common skeleton that you can't use on its own. There are other modular bits that go on top to make a full fledged OS, and the choices of what those are is what makes a distribution. Learn more about the options available for the modular bits - the ones that you should concern yourself with for now are:

• package managers: the program responsible for installing and managing software. This is one of the main differences between the major popular variants of Linux(Debian, Arch, fedora etc). For example, on Debian and distros based on it, you'd use apt. That's why you would've probably used apt on Ubuntu, it's based on Debian.
• desktop environment: all the programs involved with the user interface - the main UI itself. This is a subjective thing and people use different desktop environments based on their workflow.

Once you get this modularity based perspective, distributions wont be overwhelming and vague. You'll understand why people are recommending mint or popOS:

• it's Ubuntu based and there are many popular Debian and Ubuntu based distros out there. You'll be able to get software easily and if there's some problem you need to debug, there's a relevant question and answer out there
• mint's desktop environment is cinnamon, which is simple, clean and not too jarring for people coming from windows

You'll also know, you can choose whatever you want as long as it's Ubuntu based for your learning phase. Only at that point I think it will make sense to dual boot. You can boot in for particular reasons instead of a vague "let me understand Linux". The reasons will be finding alternative software to daily drive, learning how to use the terminal or just getting comfortable with Linux in general. From there, you can find your own way or reach out to the community with questions specific for your use cases.

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.

I just made the full time switch to pop os and I've been happy so far

I have an arguably bad piece of advice, but one I hadn't seen in skimming the replies.

You could always install Windows in a VM. Libvirt and virt-manager offer a pleasant GUI experience so it's easy to do. If you give the VM a heavy resource allotment (while leaving a reasonable amount for the host) it should still perform well. The VM video driver is the only place you take a not insignificant performance hit, but for A/V manipulation I don't think it'll matter. Unless you use GPU based video encoding. In which case it'll be CPU bound now so slower. You can potentially do PCI pass through to your GPU but that adds complexity.

A big downside here is that as far as Windows is concerned, this is different "hardware" so it won't activate based on your physical device. As I recall, it only allows the use of one core while unactivated which is pretty much unusable. So a pretty hefty expense relative to a personal VM, I think. But it is an option.

My advice is, learning new things can be a pleasure, so try to improve your learning skills. Everything is possible then.

I personally finally made the fulltime switch in November 2021 after years of on again off again attempts. The one I was finally able to stick with was Endeavour OS with KDE desktop. It's basically just an arch distro with a good installer and som QoL apps. Easy to maintain and a good community if you need assistance.

And with the creation of Bottles running windows software has been surprisingly easy. I do some home studio recording and just got EZdrummer setup as a vst in Ardour, and it just works.