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

[David Rock]

> On Jun 28, 2016, at 18:16, boB Stepp <robertvstepp at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Jun 27, 2016 at 10:48 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> What about running Win7 in a virtual machine?
> 
> What type of performance hit will I take when running CPU intensive
> processes?  I don't yet have any real experiences with running virtual
> machines.  

Ultimately, not likely to be all that much.  The bigger constraint with running VMs is often available ram.  

>> 
>> 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.
> 
> Alan obviously likes this distro.  And my teacher wife at the
> beginning of this summer break switched several of her class PCs to
> Mint.  Be nice to be writing software for the same environment, so
> this might be a positive here.

That’s as good a reason as any. :-)

As I’m sure you have gathered by now, picking a distro is a lot like picking a brand of car.  *Linux* underneath is largely similar across all the distros, what you are picking is the wrapper around it.  It’s more about the package manager used, and the philosophy of the maintainers than anything.  The only logical option is throw a dart and just try one.  If you don’t like how they do things, throw another dart until you find what you like.  This is the blessing and the curse of linux; endless variety. 

Regarding the package management, there are basically two models: RPM-based and dpkg-based (yes, there are others, but these are the two big players).  RPM-based (often referred to as yum) is anything similar to Red Hat (fedora, CentOS, etc), dpkg-based (sometimes referred to as apt) is anything based on debian (ubuntu, mint, etc).  How they work is fundamentally different, but any distro that uses the same package management will largely “feel” like any other.

If you value Alan’s opinion (and arguably, your wife’s is more important), try out Mint. You may or may not like it, but you won’t know until you try.  I still say a dry run in a VM to get a feel for it would do wonders for you regardless.


— 
David Rock
david at graniteweb.com