If you have a spare solid state drive or a portable HDD (most USB sticks are a bit too slow for a proper install), maybe install a Linux distribution onto that portable device, then you can just boot from that, then you only need to boot switch in Bios to Windows when you need to use it again. This has the advantage of you not needing to setup a complicated dual boot setup. When you are settled in with Linux, open your drive where Windows is located from Linux, copy your files over (don’t forget your bookmarks and saved passwords) and then you can clone your linux install from your portable drive over your old Windows install using a tool such as dd.
Thanks for the advice. I plan on adding another internal SSD and installing Linux on that. I should have been more specific in my original post.
You’re saying I can access the filesystem on my windows drive from Linux? So I could directly copy files back and forth? I thought I’d have to copy them onto an external drive, reboot, and then copy to the Linux drive.
The response you got above is the best advice. Get a second internal drive of any type and size, and install distros on that. You totally can partition your existing windows drive and install linux alongside it, but… you’ll probably screw something up along the way and bork your windows install. Use another drive and it’s much harder to do. If you want to be super safe, you can unplug your windows drive during installs and then it’s literally impossible to break your windows drive.
The other advantage is that nobody knows what distro will be right for you. That means you’ll want to distro hop - and that’s so much easier when you have another drive you can just format and start over with (and not worry about your boot loader).
To your follow up question, yes, linux can read and write to the contents of your windows drive. If you mount that drive, then you can do whatever you want to it, including deleting things that break your windows installation.
Mint Cinnamon user praising it in the comments, on the case!
I switched to Linux in the earlier days of Windows 8.1. Mint was the second distro I tried out after Ubuntu Unity, and it’s still my daily driver ten years later. Cinnamon felt more familiar to me An XP-Vista-7 veteran, than Win 8.1 and 10. Mint feels like someone sat down and designed the whole thing, rather than slapping layer after layer of new crap on top of the same code from the late 90’s.
Out of the box Mint is very usable, the customization I do to it is stuff like change the wallpaper and default color scheme.
The Cinnamon team just gets me. They make software for people like me.
Don’t forget your passwords and bookmarks stored in browser when doing the copy over.
Personally, I’d use Full Disk Encryption (FDE) because it’s a default option on the Fedora installer and is more secure, and well-tested, and easier to configure.
For your planned installables, I’d keep a list of apps you regularly install in a file somewhere (even better would be a script which installs them all) then when you distro-hop it’s easier as you can just change your script for whatever package manager.
Some of your apps will store their configuration in your home directory in a dot file, you might be able to copy these over one-by-one for each app.
Have you decided on Fedora Workstation or Fedora Silverblue? Each have their merits and demerits, and its worth investigating.
Bookmarks and passwords are taken care of. And for the apps I’ll try to get migrated to flatpaks as many as I can while still on original system.
I also see that full disk encryption is being recommended a lot, and I don’t have any solid reasons to encrypt only /home.
I have not given much thought on Silverblue. Is it “flatpak-only”? If so I’ll need to go through my apps to see if that could work. And my backup strategy will need to change - I use Duplicacy that is not available as a Flatpak
Why not use a live ISO version of something and boot it from a USB, if you need a full set of network troubleshooting tools, the Kali Linux Everything ISO for example will definitely have everything.
Why don’t you install flatpak on Ubuntu, make the packaging migration before doing the OS migration so you can evaluate your workflow with the new packaging system? Afer you’re used and confident with flatpak, backup and restore the flatpak folder into fedora and you transition should be smoother (don’t need to worry with 2 stuff at the same time)
The most important Linux advice I have is this: Linux isn't Windows. Don't expect things to works the same.
Don't try too hard to re-configure things that don't match the way things are on Windows. If there isn't an easy way to get a certain behavior, there's probably a reason for it.
Really trying to understand what “meh” means in terms of office software.
They all are kinda meh. I dont get overly excited with office stuff do you?
Over the years I have used both Libre and ms office. Some use cases were so much better with Libre. Now days it’s kind of a wash really. You write words or you calculate cells. If you are calculating any large amount of cells do your self a favor and get it into a database.
And if it’s a presentation, reveal.js is miles better than PowerPoint.
I still wish the Solus team all the success, but this has genuinely been exhausting. First they plan a switch to Qt6, then abandon it for GTK. Then that became too opinionated, so they switched plans for Enlightment and their stack. I’d rather see them commit to something, and just finish it, but Josh doesn’t like to do business like that
May have been. Point is that Solus and Budgie, whether separate or united again, are in a perpetually unfinished and undecided upon state, to the point where Solus almost died entirely recently
I don’t know whether I have gotten some settings wrong in Steam, but I have to open the Properties window of every freshly installed game, and set it to launch using Proton GE, otherwise it just defaults to nothing. So if a game doesn’t work for you, always check if it is configured to launch using at least some kind of Proton thingy.
I can see why you want to dual boot, given your use case. For gaming and MS office, Linux is not better than Windows. That said, Linux is fun to learn and you can experiment and gradually move everything over from Windows.
If you want the absolute easiest transition from Windows, I think Linux Mint Cinnamon is the best. It looks like Windows out of the box and is organized similarly. Its like going to a familiar grocery store where you know where to find the things you need. It is stable, there are rarely any weird conflicts or updates that break the system, and it comes with all the codecs you’ll need for media. In terms of installing new software, the software “store” is so simple, it makes installing software much like installing apps on Android (without all the bullshit marketing, of course). Shit just works. Steam, spotify, etc. are right there and install flawlessly. Many Steam games are native Linux and you’ll be able to install the Linux version of any game you own. For Windows-only games, you can gradually experiment with Wine, etc. and see how that works for you.
MS Office is obviously the elephant in the room, but office apps are pretty standardized at this point. You can use MS 365 online apps. Or, it is an easy transition from Word, Excel and Powerpoint to LibreOffice. Much more intuitive than using Google apps, for example. Write a few papers in LibreOffice and just save in Word format for submission (although most profs will accept Open Document Format as well, which is also supported by MS Office). Double-check formatting in Windows or the online Office 365 apps if you are worried. It is pretty easy to get used to if you use Office like most people do.
But don’t take my word for it. Make a bootable live usb and see for yourself. …readthedocs.io/…/latest/
I used to run Tumbleweed with KDE on my Nvidia system. I found the rolling release structure of Tumbleweed to cause extra work for me, because kernel updates came frequently and occasionally broke the Nvidia drivers. As a workaround, I ended up pinning my kernel to an old version.
Nvidia drivers have been at least a little troublesome on every distro I’ve used, particularly with the additional CUDA libraries.
One nice thing about Suse is that it uses BTRFS by default, and you can use snapper to revert your whole system if something goes wrong. So if Nvidia shits the the bed after an update, it’s easy to roll back. Most distros default to ext4 and do not have snapshot support by default, which feels like living in the stone age to me after using Suse and BTRFS.
Of course you CAN set up BTRFS and snapshots in any distro, but that’s a lot to ask for a beginner with Linux. I strongly recommend choosing a distro that does that for you, like Suse.
Flatpak apps will use the same dotfiles as apps installed via traditional methods, however the storage location will likely be different. Most dotfiles will be contained within their respective flatpak app directory under ~/.var, so you can cherry pick which settings you want to bring over.
linux
Oldest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.