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

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Mon, Jun 27, 2016 at 09:52:50PM -0500, boB Stepp wrote:
> 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.

What about running Win7 in a virtual machine?


Otherwise, I like:

Linux Mint. Good software repositories, more conservative than Ubuntu, 
not as stick-in-the-mud as Debian. Based on Debian/Ubuntu so the quality 
is good, mostly aimed at non-hard core Linux geeks.

Also Debian. Not Ubuntu.

I used to be a Fedora guy, but then they started changing too quickly 
for my tastes. If you didn't upgrade to the latest and greatest every 
fifteen minutes, you couldn't get help. So I moved to Centos, but that's 
a very conservative distribution, and its hard to packages for it unless 
you're prepared to build them yourself.


> 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.

Most distros are like that. The difference with Arch is that package 
management means downloading and compiling source code, rather than 
having others compile it for you.


> 2)  (1) led me into looking at Manjaro Linux.

I don't know that one.

> 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.

XFCE works very well. You might like TDE (Trinity), which is a fork of 
KDE 3 after the KDE developers turned it into the abomination of KDE 4.


> 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.

That's actually not that hard. I'll reply to that in more detail later.


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

Linux is *extremely* stable. The problem is, when things don't work, 
it's usually only the quirky issues that don't work.

There's a couple of exceptions to this rule. Bluetooth is quirky on 
Linux, and support for hardware suspend is awful.

> 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.  ~(:>))

Heh, good luck :-)

Reading Stackoverflow is good for that. Contributing to SO, not so much.

Stay away from the IRC channels, they tend to eat newbies alive.


> 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.

Dependency issues? What are those?

That's what package management is for. Whether you use yum on Red Hat 
based systems (Centos, Fedora) or apt-get and aptitude on Debian based 
systems (Ubuntu, Linux Mint), you'll rarely care about dependencies.


> 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?

Malware? What's that?

*wink*

I'll follow up with a longer response later.


> 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.

That will be called Linux :-)



-- 
Steve