this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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Advice for a middle-age, moderately pc knowledgeable person to finally switch to or become proficient with Linux? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 year ago by Andonyx@lemmy.ml to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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This is my third attempt. Partly to rage quit Windows, and partly to gain utility and control with some professional AV software.

I have converted an old Asus netbook to Ubuntu netbook remix and used it for a while. I was impressed with how much better that tiny thing ran with Linux than Windows. But in the end it still had less power than a TI-84. So I stopped using it, and never really learned Linux proper.

I dual boot my Chromebook, so I can use gimp for photos on vacation, but everything I do with the Linux partition is cut and paste from articles by people who know what they're doing. (I was motivated to post here by a meme about that.)

I'm thinking of dual booting my main desktop, because I need Windows for some fairly processor intense A/V software I use for work. So what would be a good distro to look into for a novice and where should I look for a tutorial? I would ultimately like to see if I can use Linux to run my AV software in emulation and add drivers for some professional audio interfaces. I'm fed up with windows and trying to see how far I can get without it. Your help is appreciated in advance, and if this is inappropriate for this topic, let me know and I'll delete it.

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[–] pineapple@lemmy.fmhy.ml 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Tippon@lemmy.fmhy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"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."

You can transfer a Windows licence from another installation, so in OP's situation, from the original installation. During Windows setup, select the 'I don't have a license key' option, then once Windows is installed, go into settings, click the Windows isn't activated option, and go through the activation troubleshooter.

I can't remember exactly where, but somewhere in there is the option to transfer the license from another installation. It has to be the same version of Windows.

[–] nan@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The license transfer also depends what edition was being used. OEM may be stuck with the hardware, traditionally you could take a retail license to a new install.

[–] Tippon@lemmy.fmhy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

That's a good point. It's been so long since I had to buy a new copy that I can't remember what version I have.