I have dabbled with Linux quite a few times in the past (dual booting with Windows) and I'm looking to get into it again. Any recommendations? Any horror stories?

So far I've daily driven Ubuntu, Mint, Manjaro, and CrunchBang. KDE and Gnome are my go-to DEs.

Manjaro on the desktop, CentOS in the server.

It works for me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

@zlice Exactly what I'm anticipating 😂

get yourself some antergos with gnome :P

https://devrant.com/rants/1554077/...

@JoshBent Antergos is a good option. :))

@starrynights89 I thoroughly enjoyed Manjaro, but change is nice. ☺️

@JoshBent Antergos is definitely an option! Also, that grub theme... 👌

@0bl1v1on yeah, that grub theme is amazing, I am glad I finally searched for one

@0bl1v1on btw antergos has also the advantage of being much less toxic than manjaro and arch forums imho, and also is better organized, so you can just watch the most important announcements, instead of looking at package drama in your feed all day.

@zlice yes and the way the boot records are displayed

Arch Linux and KDE aren't that bad actually. The pacman package manager really makes things convenient, and most pieces of software are available on the AUR, like Wikipedia but for software where it's community maintained.

Ubuntu 4 server, desktop & laiff.

All you need is Ubuntu, don't let anyone tell you otherwise!

Jokes aside, v18.04 is worth a shot. I'm looking to experiment myself though so 📍

@Kandelborg the whole ubuntu monitoring and live updating thing does always lure one to try it atleast

@JoshBent I really do enjoy my automatic updates when I'm not running them. Sometimes I can have my system run fully updated without the need for restart 40-80 hours. That said, I rarely do because of me wanting to keep a 'clean slate'.

I'm not sure about the monitoring, what are you referring to?

Edit: no live monitoring, just monitoring lol

@Kandelborg this thing https://landscape.canonical.com/

I fell in love with BBQLinux(MATE version) It's basically Arch, with some configuration descisions made for you, including MATE. On top of pacman it has the aur helper yaourt to build and install packages from AUR. The distro is aimed at Android developers, but it's been great for me (a non-android dev) anyways; and with Arch's rolling releases, keeping the system up to date is a breeze.

@JoshBent This makes things even better! And here I thought that Docker and DO monitoring was all I could ever dream of in terms of services that do these things. Thank you!

@Kandelborg have never used it myself, but always wanted to try, because it looked really useful, but never got around to try it, because proxmox basically gives me all that too, except for the handy in-server updating, another cool thing to check out would be: https://my-netdata.io/

#neverstoplearning

You are seriously introducing someone to things like these for the first time in their lives. And I can tell you by being that person, it is awe inspiring!

@Kandelborg was that an @ at me? 😅

@JoshBent Ofc it was! I just didn't press the reply button on PC - being the android dR user I am, not using my phone haha

@Kandelborg I'm glad I could help then 😊

@JoshBent I'm so happy to know that there's so many niches to explore. I barely got enough time 😅

Are you sure you want to dualboot?

I myself find virtualization to be a better option if your computer can pull it off. More specifically, I run Arch Linux with i3 + Windows in a virtual machine and I have passed my other GPU for windows to use. This setup gets you pretty much native or at least near-native performance, and with the nice bonus of being able to run both Linux and windows or any other operating system simultaneously, so it eliminates the need to reboot.

Of course this setup has it's drawbacks too.
You would need to have enough ram to run two operating systems, enough cores in your CPU so that you can devide them and still get enough performance for both host and guest systems, and last but not least, you need a second GPU if you don't have one already.
Also, your hardware needs to support iommu and UEFI.

Integrated graphics chips, eg. Intel HD Graphics can also do the job as the other GPU needed for the setup.
It's also possible to do with one GPU but its pretty hard

@bettehem I'm running dualboot on a Win10(bought as a 8) laptop with UEFI. It's clearly a lot better than a VM. Your setup is only viable if, as said you have more than 1 GPU.

I only have to restart while pressing shift and chose my 'ubuntu' device. I'm enjoying several Linux installations this way and have to note that my machine is quite powerful, the bottleneck is the graphics.

So I'd say that if you have a normal computer with only one GPU, dualboot is preferred.

Mann , dual boot is cool ,but when fucked up, makes the whole thing a mess. And with ubuntu, DO NOT INSTALL WITH DEFAULT SETTINGS .
Free some 300-400gb of space and then install ubuntu. I accidentally followed some guy from YouTube who said to follow default instructions and now my ubuntu (or grub?) is installed in the middle of my drive in just 50gb of space.

Ubuntu gives a lot better power to devs, but unfortunately I have to revert back to Windows -_-

Every time I install Linux Distro on my laptop, there's a problem on my Windows, when I need system restore, I can't run the system restore because Grub (the system restore won't run and grub is freeze, only showing black screen).

I don't know how to change the multiboot management to Windows, so I ended up reinstall my Windows. :'(

I already search it on internet, but maybe because I'm too lazy too read, I don't find the answer.

It's hard when you only have one laptop and searching a way to fix it on your smartphone.

Now I'm using Linux on virtual machine, it's a bit slow, but better than reinstall my Windows again.

Sorry if my English is bad. :D

edit: I use Elementary OS on my virtual machine

Mint. Pick your DE. By far the easiest for folks new to Linux. Solid, too.

You could just use the Linux subsystem for windows 10

Lost my windows installation twice while dual booting windows with ubuntu, the second time I couldnt reinstall windows cuz' the usb drive I had wasn't large enough but did windows media creation kit tell me that, nope it did not. So I used countless day on getting my only computer to work again. And ended up with a fresh install of windows after a week.

P.s sorry if my Mandarin is bad

I'm running Kubuntu 18.04 on all my devices, home and at work. So far no major flaws. So, if you like KDE, this would be my recommendation.

Ubuntu is just convenient because most software exists as a .deb, it's very stable, not that much out of date if you compare it to Debian. If you want a rolling distro/more up-to-dateness I'd take a look at Manjaro or maybe Opensuse Tumbleweed.

I play the touhou games, which are all made with directx. The older games are also made with smaller screens in mind (with a full screen option). I once tried running the 8th game in full screen but and black screen. I tried exiting the game and suddenly my screen resolution was like 800x600 with no option to change it. I eventually fixed it with the help of older forum posts about some other issue.

The other issue is one I have at the moment, where something breaks at the login screen and I'm unable to login. This seems to be an issue specific to my desktop though. And I circumvent it by logging in to tty1 and starting x. It's an issue I've had for a years time not where I keep telling myself to fix it, but as soon as I open my browser I forget about it :v

And I think that's it for issues I've faced. The rest is just success stories from there on, and it feels much nicer to develop on Linux than it does Windows