this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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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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[–] rawfox@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago

My advice is, learning new things can be a pleasure, so try to improve your learning skills. Everything is possible then.

[–] 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.

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[–] K0W4LSK1@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago

I just made the full time switch to pop os and I've been happy so far

[–] rokejulianlockhart@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

I use OpenSUSE, because it has YaST, which is basically the Control Panel in Windows. Without it, I'd have to use the terminal. It also installs on just about anything.

[–] Zink@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Install Linux Mint in a virtualbox VM. It gets up and running so quickly, and works extremely well.

I have been focusing more on learning Linux at work, between some Fedora VMs we use for various things, and the Mint VM I spun up myself. It’s great because jumping between windows and Linux is a simple matter of moving the mouse cursor to a different monitor. I usually just leave Linux Mint running full screen on one of my monitors.

I’m not experienced with lots of distros, but Mint is damned impressive.

Get a pre-owned Thinkpad or Dell Latitude for cheap. Upgrade it if you want, especially with SSD & RAM. Get some Linux on it -- I recommend Linux Mint for ease of use.

[–] flounders@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

The best advice I can give is to just use Linux. Back in early 2006 when I started switching over to Linux I would dual boot, and any time I ran into something that was hard to do on Linux I would just boot into Windows to save time. Eventually I decided to stick with it and not reboot when that would happen. Linux back then was not as user friendly as it is now, so for the most part this should be the exception and not the rule. Obviously some software is going to be Windows specific, but the best thing you can do to learn is just stick with Linux and use it.

As for distros, whatever is the most used which is probably Ubuntu right now, will be best as people will have plenty of answers and questions that will cover what you are going through compared to a niche distro. When you get more experience with Linux, you will get a better sense for what you want out of a distro like rolling releases like Arch, functional package management like with NixOS or whatever else may be important to you. So just stick with Ubuntu or whatever is more popular right now and reevaluate after you get to the point your comfortable with command line tools.

[–] Sneptaur@pawb.social 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Consider reading the content on Linuxjourney.com

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[–] shrugal@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Apparently ChatGPT is really good as a personal tutor. You can ask it specific questions and it will answer with detailed tutorials and step-by-step guides.

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