A few nuggets based on my somewhat recent jump to Linux.
DUAL BOOT & WHAT DISTRO
I intended to use dual boot to slowly migrate over to Linux. Thankfully that wasn't necessary. One morning MS was particularly problematic. For several months it was a serious pain, nearly every day. One morning I woke up. MS went too far. That night I gave Linux Mint a good run from a live desktop. I ditched MS and all of it's nightmares the next morning. I backed up my files, performed a DOD wipe on my hard drive, installed Linux Mint. I haven't once regretted it. I understand reluctance, but Linux isn't nearly as hard as I was afraid it would be. The real problem is that the idea of leaving something familiar is intimidating. That's it, nothing more.
WINDOWS BASED APPS
Given that you mentioned Win 7, I'm assuming you probably have your own installation disks for other software. If this is the case, I have 2 experiences to share. As already mentioned, most popular and most in demand software, or apps as they are now called are cloud based. That essentially means your OS is irrelevant. I'm required to use TEAMS for my job. I sign into my account from a browser on a Linux machine to use the software.
I had a lot of Windows based software, very expensive software by the way. I paid good money for perpetual licenses. BTW, 'PERPETUAL' means
forever, doesn't expire, always relevant....Those companies that I won't name publicly conveniently no longer have servers to authenticate all that expensive software with perpetual licenses. Instead of invalidating the licenses, they took down the servers that that authenticated them.
So....
If your planning on reinstalling any apps in a virtual Windows machine, you may very well be out of luck when you try to validate or authorize them.
There are only 2 apps that I have not found comparable replacements for.
- Adobe ACROBAT (not READER)
- A lot of people will tell you Libre Draw is a good alternative. As someone who used Acrobat A LOT I can personally tell you it isn't. The best alternatives I've found aren't free. I've found other ways to get the same results, but it's a lot more work. Anyone who's used Adobe Acrobat extensively knows what I'm talking about.
- AutoCAD
- It's an industry standard. Yes there are other good CAD apps, but if you've used AutoCAD it can frustrating moving to something new. AutoCAD is complicated and time consuming to learn. The concepts of every CAD app are the same, but 'L-Enter' doesn't mean the same thing in Double CAD as it does in AutoCAD. There are a lot of little things like that. You may be able to save a drawing with the same file extension and open it in either program, but my work was always altered in one way or another.
With the exception of Adobe Acrobat and AutoCAD, every app your using now probably has an equally useful and easy to use open source alternative. MS Office, or Office 365 as it's now called is easily replaced with Libre Office. You probably won't notice the difference. It can open and save using the same file extensions.
VIRTUAL MACHINES
They sound like a great idea, but there are some caveats. I'm making a few assumptions given that your using Win 7 now. Unless you have a custom built PC, it's at least around 14 years old.
- CPU
- It must have virtualization technology in order to create a virtual machine. I know there are ways to get around this if your CPU doesn't have it. I don't know how well they work.
- MEMORY
- I'm guessing that you have around 8 GB of RAM. That's not much to spread between two machines.
- STORAGE
- 250 to 500 GB
- I keep almost everything backed up somewhere other than my computer. For me that's more than enough. If you don't back up somewhere else, is this enough for 2 operating systems?
- The logical solution would be to buy more storage, but AI has caused the price of storage and memory to sky rocket.
- Virtual machines can be slow. If your not tech savvy, if you don't love the challenge or you're scared of complicated things, virtual machines may not be the way to go for you. In my experience, performance of virtual machines is kind of hit or miss and there are a lot of little things that effect it. If you don't have time to put into research or already know these things, you may want to skip a vm.
The number one piece of advice I can give someone who is switching over to Linux from Windows is this.
Learn the terminology. In my experience, many people who use Linux have never used Windows, at all. Believe it or not, this is true! If they have used Windows, it's been a while. When I say 'a while' I mean back in the days of XP. Things have changed a lot since then. If you're using Windows terminology to ask for help with a Linux machine, people may not understand your question. That I think is the biggest barrier to making the switch. Linux is NOT HARD, but it doesn't run itself. There are no trouble shooters that will fix problems for you like there are in Windows. When those little things happen, you'll have to look around the net for a solution or ask for help on the forums. Do the best you can to phrase clear questions.
The people around here are very friendly and for some reason they seem to love to help people! If you can't find the right word or if you're not sure, describe it as best you can. Better yet, take a screen shot of what's going on. People can help you much better that way.
When you have questions be sure to give details of your machines hardware. There is a command you can put in the terminal and then upload in your post to tell them everything they need to know about your system. I think either
@wizardfromoz or
@Condobloke or a lot of other people can tell you what it is. If you make things as easy as possible for them to help you, you'll get help a lot faster.
I use Windows 11 at work and had machines with all releases since XP. I can help 'translate' if need be.
