Anyone wanna help be pick the best option for me? :)

Where should I install linux?

  • Total voters
    100
M

Madcowe

New Member
Joined
Apr 13, 2019
Messages
9
Reaction score
11
Credits
0
Hello World!

This post might be a tad long because I want to kind of explain my situation and what I'm looking for to try and find the closest thing to "ideal" for me...

There will be a TL;DR at the end.

First and foremost, I've been on and off of linux for a few years now, and I would have been using it exclusively right now except for the fact that I like playing games on Steam, and by the time I last installed linux only about half of them worked... However lately I've been bit by the "linux bug" again and want to go back to it somehow.

And to do that I thought about a few options:
  • Virtual Box (probably not the best option)
  • Dual boot (I have 2 HDDs on this PC, both with around 250GB - 300GB free)
  • Getting an old Laptop and installing some distro on it.
Last laptop I had I think I messed up the partitions somehow and GRUB wouldn't work properly, I'd have to manually go into the BOOT on my bios to change between grub (which would only allow me to boot linux) or windows.

Here are my current specs if relevant:
  • AMD Ryzen 5 1400 CPU (3.20GHz)
  • 8GB RAM
  • nVidia GeForce 1060 3GB

The other thing I would like your opinion on is, as expected, which distro?

Here are a few I tried in the past:
  • Ubuntu (was my first one, but I don't really like it much now)
  • Mint (I got like 4 different CDs with the different environments on it lol)
  • OpenSUSE
Now, in order to maybe make the decision a bit more specific I'll also mention what kind of things I'd probably be doing in it:
  • Video recording and editing
  • Programming (right now C# would be great if possible, but another language would be fine)
  • Occasional gaming
  • Some basic pentesting on home equipment to understand how things work
and I guess that's about it :)


TL;DR:

HOW should I install linux?
  • Virtual Box
  • Dual Boot
  • Another machine
Which Distro would you recommend? Taking into account that my priorities would likely be (by order):
  1. Video recording and editing
  2. Programming
  3. Gaming
  4. Pentesting.


Hope this is a decent quality post, please feel free to ask me for any kind of information that might be relevant and which I haven't mentioned before :)


EDIT:

I forgot to mention, yes I know these are opinion questions, but that's precisely what I'm looking for, your opinions, so I can weigh in the answers and pick which ones makes the most sense for me :)
 
Last edited:


I prefer to dual boot using two hard drives in my desktop. Windows is installed on one hard drive with it's own boot loader and various Linux's are installed on the other with the Grub boot loader. I use my BIOS Boot Device menu to choose which to boot when I want to switch (by default Linux will boot).

I use Virtual Box for testing Linux distros and occasionally installing Windows 7 to run a particular app but in my experience the extra layer between the operating system and actual hardware negatively impacts performance. For a daily driver install I would run on hardware and not through Virtual Box.

As far as which distro use - I think they are all good. The biggest difference is some are more 'bleeding edge' with the latest software than others which tend towards being more stable. I would think that for gaming and pentesting the more current software would be better. Which leads me to believe a rolling release such as Manjaro would be a good choice.

There are a few distros which are more inclined for video production but that may be just a matter of which software is included out of the box. I think any or all of the video editing and production software would be available either from the repos or PPA's or even from source. I would choose a distro I felt the most comfortable with and then add the packages I wanted for the use case.

Just my opinion based on my experience.

P.S. Klaatu used to have some good podcasts discussing multi-media production on Linux. Introduced some applications I was not aware of.
Klaatu, also known as notKlaatu, is a technology journalist, hacker, and podcaster specializing in multimedia production on Linux systems.
Click to expand...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaatu_(podcaster)
 
You didn't mention QEMU/KVM! That's my choice, though I haven't used VirtualBox in years, so maybe would be similar.

You can use KVM directly, but the libvirt packages have better documentation. They form a consistent front end for KVM or Xen or others. You have to install several packages: virt-manager, virt-viewer, virt-install (or virtinst).

I display my Windows10 virtual machine in its own virtual console. When I press CTRL-ALT-F10, my Linux PC becomes a Windows PC for all intents. It's hard to tell that it's running in a virtual machine. Only the CTRL-ALT-Fn keys get me out of it.
 
Vrai said:
I prefer to dual boot using two hard drives in my desktop. Windows is installed on one hard drive with it's own boot loader and various Linux's are installed on the other with the Grub boot loader. I use my BIOS Boot Device menu to choose which to boot when I want to switch (by default Linux will boot).

I use Virtual Box for testing Linux distros and occasionally installing Windows 7 to run a particular app but in my experience the extra layer between the operating system and actual hardware negatively impacts performance. For a daily driver install I would run on hardware and not through Virtual Box.

As far as which distro use - I think they are all good. The biggest difference is some are more 'bleeding edge' with the latest software than others which tend towards being more stable. I would think that for gaming and pentesting the more current software would be better. Which leads me to believe a rolling release such as Manjaro would be a good choice.

There are a few distros which are more inclined for video production but that may be just a matter of which software is included out of the box. I think any or all of the video editing and production software would be available either from the repos or PPA's or even from source. I would choose a distro I felt the most comfortable with and then add the packages I wanted for the use case.

Just my opinion based on my experience.

P.S. Klaatu used to have some good podcasts discussing multi-media production on Linux. Introduced some applications I was not aware of.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaatu_(podcaster)
Click to expand...

Heard about Manjaro before and after you mentioned it I looked into it and it does sound great, will definitely try it out eventually specially when I get more than 1Mb download speed (yes, megabit, not megabyte)

Until then I guess I'll just study linux a bit, even though it only is worth a small amount of I don't practice :3
 
I think the distro depends on how much you want to get your hands dirty. If you don't want to get them dirty at all, or as close to that as possible, use Mint. Ubuntu would be next. I love Fedora, but it can mean getting your hands dirty a bit because many apps are packaged for Debian and you have to come up with ways to convert. There's other distros where your hands make you look like a grease monkey. I've never messed with them so I can't refer you. You're going to be able to get all kinds of apps for what you need using any of the distros, but I think the Debian based ones (Mint, Ubuntu) will be the easiest for you. For gaming you can use Steam, they have a fantastic compatibility layer now, using Phenon and Steam Play. Not all games work but a lot of them do, even if they aren't listed as completely compatible. As for Windows, you can run it in whatever VM software you want. The one that seems easiest to me is VMWare Player. It's free and developed by a company that makes money off of VMs, so they have to know what they're doing to stay in business.
 
Madcowe said:
Again, if I didn't play a lot of games on steam I'd totally agree with you xD
Click to expand...
I do play games on Steam, some of them even have native support for Linux. These are the games I play most often. Only the two within the red rectangles won't run in Linux. Every other game you see on this list - not a problem with Linux: https://i.postimg.cc/Rhqzrp5s/steam.png
 
GOOD NEWS EVERYONE! :D

My dad had an unused old laptop he didn't need, already installed Manjaro on it :3

Also not too terrible, 4GB RAM, and I think the disk is 128GB SSD.

One really weird thing though... it has the "nipple" mouse thing in the middle of the keyboard AND a touchpad... weirder than that? It has a Left click and a Right click button BOTH on top AND on the bottom! It has 2 buttons for each, wtf lmao


EDIT: Taking into account I installed Manjaro should I make most posts about linux and etc there or is here fine?
 
Madcowe said:
it has the "nipple" mouse thing in the middle of the keyboard AND a touchpad...
Click to expand...
When I touch-type on a laptop with a mousepad, I always end up dragging my right thumb across it accidentally. This sends the mouse off in wild directions where it selects some other app. Then, without realizing it, I'm typing into something else.

That's extremely annoying, so I disable the mousepad in BIOS. The "nipple" mouse, as you call it, works great, once you get used to it.
 
kenJackson said:
When I touch-type on a laptop with a mousepad, I always end up dragging my right thumb across it accidentally. This sends the mouse off in wild directions where it selects some other app. Then, without realizing it, I'm typing into something else.

That's extremely annoying, so I disable the mousepad in BIOS. The "nipple" mouse, as you call it, works great, once you get used to it.
Click to expand...
I actually used it at first because the touchpad had a huge sensitivity (probably mouse acceleration).


Welp, now to figure out what to do with this hahahah.

Feel like I'm gonna have to tweak the terminal a lot and/or learn a ton of linux shortcuts
 
"tweak the terminal"..?....make sure you have first installed Timeshift so you can recover from 'tweaks' which go south...!
 
Just further to what Brian (@Condobloke ) has said above - in most cases with Manjaro, you should be able to install it with

Code: 
sudo pacman -S timeshift

... which is more current than what I have in the video.

(Wizard appears in a puff of smoke)

I run about 90 Distros, and of those, about 12 are Arch-based, and 4 of those Manjaro - Cinnamon, Deepin, Xfce, and GNOME. So I can likely answer a few of your questions.

By all means stop here in General if you wish, in case you change your mind on Manjaro. If you stick with it I can move you over there.

Welcome to linux.org BTW if I have not already said that somewhere (memory is not as good as it was 4,000 years ago) :)

Chris Turner
wizardfromoz
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Members online

Total: 553 (members: 8, guests: 545)

Latest posts

Top