Only beacuse there are a couple of softawares that I need that don’t run well in Bottles (Nitro Pro and an old app for anothere thing). It’s a laptop with CPU i7 and a NVIDIA graphic card 1050 ti. Which distro would be best suited for the task? Is Mint ok? Thank you. Update: Setting the dual boot was getting messy, so I clean installed Mint. I’ll try Windows VM later hoping it wont be too difficoult.
Take any distro you fancy, Mint is a good start. Create a bootable USB stick an try it out. This is does not modify anything on your computer, just loads linux and let’s you test it. I usually play a youtube video. This shows that wifi, video and sound work out of the box.
Next step could be installing it in a virtual machine. Dual booting can be a pain in the ass due to Windows not playing nice.
I always recommend people just install linux on their previous laptop if they kept it. Most will find their old laptop performs better with linux than the newer one with windows.
If you ever try dual booting again, just wanted to say it works much better if you have linux and windows on separate drives because windows gets to do whatever it wants on its own bootloader while linux handles everything else including switching to windows. Familiar with acer nitro laptops myself and 1050ti with i7 I assume means it’s the older model with the hdd bay you can get to without disassembling. Should be simple enough to plop a 500GB SATA SSD in there for windows if you don’t have one already.
P.S. be very careful with the hinges on that laptop bc it ain’t fun when they break
Really any distro should be fine. It’s more a matter of getting the bootloader setup correctly.
Do note that, depending on the configuration, Windows will randomly overwrite stuff and mess up dual boot.
If you can for your situation, I would suggest running a Windows VM inside Linux to get certain tasks done.
I stopped dual booting windows 10 just because it kept messing up my boot loader when it performed certain updates
Well I suppose that issue goes away next month when win 10 goes EOL and stops getting updates.
You can solve that problem by making an additional efi/boot partition when you install Linux over the Windows install.
You have Linux setup with its own boot partition and the install should probe for a foreign OS, it then adds a chainloader entry in grub to point to the Windows EFI partition.
You set BIOS to boot from Linux EFI partition. When it comes up at boot you can chose Windows and Grub hands over control to the windows bootloader, but Windows is ignorant of Linux EFI existing. It now only messes with its own EFI and never touches the Linux stuff.
@utnapishtim
Another hint: Even if Lutris claims to be for games, there are often install scripts for windows applications too. So it may be worth to try to run your apps with Lutris. It should be in the mint packages (try
sudo apt install lutris). Then you can add your software in Lutris with the upper left “+” button. Just use the search in the dialog box. I managed to run FL Studio like this, exactly as performant as on windows. Good luck and welcome to the linux family!i’ve used linux in the past for servers so i did have some background but when i switched on my desktop from windows to linux, i jumped right into mint and it’s been one of the best experiences. setup was pretty easier; i recommend using a live usb to test it out since you can install right from there.
We’re you able to keep all your files from windows when you transitioned?
well most of the stuff i really wanted i either had in google drive (i just use it as an external hdd for random files) and then i moved the important stuff cough downloaded movies and shows to another external hdd and the rest i just blew away.
Copy, my major worry about swapping my daily driver over to Linux is because of the way Windows hides all my shit in clouds and random places for some reason I’m concerned I’ll lose something.
the major things i would check is your documents folder, which can be linked to onedrive, and to turn off bitlocker encryption if you’re going to remove windows entirely (your keys to it might be in your microsoft account). usually everything else is just in the folder on the drive; if you want any app data, then check the appdata folders but you’re better off just starting fresh or getting an export from the app if it allows and has a compatable linux version.
for browsing, most of my stuff was in my firefox account anyway so i could just sign back in on linux and get my bookmarks, history, etc.
just had to set up my imap info in thunderbird but all the emails were on the server so that wasn’t a big deal.
Hi, I’m dad
Consider kubuntu, it’s similar to windows
