[Tutor] OT: Recommendations for a Linux distribution to dual-boot with Win7-64 bit

[boB Stepp]

My eyes are glazing over from hours and hours of Googling on this.  I
cannot come to a rational conclusion.  Perhaps someone can help me to
do so.  I currently have a 64-bit desktop PC that I built myself.  It
is running Win7 Pro 64-bit.  I need to keep this OS as I need to run
various chess software which can be quite CPU and RAM hogging.  So an
emulation layer like Wine would not be desirable.  I don't want to run
Linux in a virtual environment; I'd rather have a dual-boot setup.  My
intent is to transition to mostly using Linux as my main OS and only
going back to Win7 when I must use certain software applications.
Also, this would be a fine time to stop Easter-egging around the
shell, etc., and more systematically learn *nix-stuff.  And quite
frankly I am getting quite tired of PowerShell and cmd.exe;  at least
compared to my Solaris 10 experiences.  So:

1)  I am not ready at this time to take on the challenge of *really*
getting into understanding *nix by installing something like Arch
Linux and having to configure almost *everything* myself from scratch.
However, I do like Arch's install once and enjoy very frequent OS and
package updates, huge package repository, etc.

2)  (1) led me into looking at Manjaro Linux.  This looks very
attractive, but there have been enough tales of woe to multi-boot
installations, that it gives me a bit of pause.  Otherwise, I think I
would immediately go this route.

3)  I do not care about eye candy.  If you could see my current
Windows desktop, it is just a solid plain blue.  In fact, a
light-weight desktop environment would be preferable as long as it was
quite functional.  Currently XFCE looks attractive.  I first ran into
this while looking at (2), but it is popping up quite frequently in
other Linux distros.

4)  It would be nice if the most recent development tools were part of
the most recent OS version, such as the latest stable Python 3, gVim,
Git, etc.  One of the commonly recurring questions I see on this list
(and the main one)is that the pre-installed Python from the OS is a
few iterations behind the current release, how can I get the latest
and make two (or more) Python versions work together without getting
confused as to which I'm using, etc.  I'm sure I could work through
those issues, but it would be nice if (a) The latest OS release had
close to the latest Python 3 release and (b) it was really easy to
upgrade to the current release without wreaking havoc with OS uses of
Python.

5)  I would like a stable Linux installation.  I'd rather not have to
frequently work hard to solve quirky issues.

6)  Good documentation available would be a solid plus as well as a
dedicated, helpful (to newbies like myself) community (Like Tutor!)
that can easily tolerate sometimes very stupid questions without
flaming me for my ignorance.  ~(:>))

7)  It should be easy to install existing software packages without
having to compile everything from source.  It would be nice if (to me)
hidden dependencies are made clear, though I realize that part of the
*nix learning curve is figuring out how to handle these sorts of
issues.

8)  How troublesome is malware for Linux?  I realize that it is not
the normal target of crackers, but is it common enough that I need to
install whatever the Linux equivalent is of anti-malware/virus
software?

9)  Despite having an i7 quad-core 3.6 GHz CPU with 32 GB RAM, it
seems that Windows with all of the constant security updating, etc.,
tends to make my PC sluggish and I am tired of sifting through
everything periodically to clear out the cruft and startup junk that
loads.  I *really* would like to have a snappy OS where everything
*stays* snappy with minimal effort on my part.

10)  I have a hard drive that has mostly text-based stuff, like Python
programs, which is formatted NTFS.  Can I share this with both Win7
and Linux?  What about the differences in line endings?  Am I going to
have to be constantly converting back and forth?

I guess that is most of it.  It will be interesting to hear your thoughts!

Thanks in advance!

-- 
boB