• generallynonsensical@lemmy.world
      7·
      12 hours ago

      Hey stranger. I always advise a dual boot setup to start with. Use windows as your daily driver and boot into Linux to learn.

      Take your time. Don’t worry about terminal stuff right away. Explore (and maybe break) things. Just don’t have anything important there at first.

      Backup twice and often. Timeshift is good. Borg (Vorta) is great.

      I wouldn’t start with mint. Probably an unpopular opinion. Debian is the way. It runs an older kernel and doesn’t get a ton of updates, and fairly forgiving. Great distro to start learning terminal with.

      Test out desktop environments. Find one you love. Then make it home. Start messing with terminal stuff. Learn the basics. Watch YouTube a lot. Learn Linux TV is an excellent channel. Learn rsync + cron. 🐐

      Then backup twice.

      Start using Wine and/or Bottles to run windows apps. Learn about appimages, flatpaks, deb files, etc. Permissions is a massive must learn. FOSS is life.

      Backup twice and often.

      I highly recommend an atomic desktop. Fedora Kinoite is brilliant and you have to really try to break it. Plus you get KDE Plasma! But any atomic distro will do.

      Backup everything twice and often.

      Slowly wean yourself off windows. When you think you’re ready for the jump, don’t do it and give yourself another week. Then learn about qemu/kvm or any other virtual machine package you like. Get a windows iso file and create a windows VM. Install apps in the VM. This is where windows lives now.

      When you think it’s time, backup twice, format your hard drive, install distro of choice, install apps, windows VM, and backup twice. Now you have the best of both worlds without windows having access to anything, and you’re a full fledged Linux user!

      Or dont. I dont care.

      • wltr@discuss.tchncs.de
        1·
        2 minutes ago

        This, but these days I’d give you guys a better and more modern advice: find a spare device to play with Linux. Get that cheap or even free laptop from someone who cannot use it, because it’s too slow and unusable. Swap the HDD with SSD, if that’s the case (modern laptops have SSDs already, usually). Install Linux there, explore. Test all your workflows. Then don’t play with dual boot thing, don’t waste your time. Just forget Windows, you’ll be surprised anyone uses it, it’ll take you a year at best, if you can do all your tasks on Linux. Not all tasks can be done with Linux, but most of them, and more coming. The more of us use the platform, the more valuable it becomes for other developers to target.

    • CMLVI@piefed.socialEnglish
      10·
      15 hours ago

      I thought it was fun for the first 10minutes when I wasn’t trying to get back to parity with my Windows install lmao. Wore off real fast. Nothing that 3 weeks of crawling the internet and typing in literal gibberish into the terminal can’t fix.

      Except for the stuff I haven’t fixed, and band-aided into working. But it’s minor stuff lol.

      • Jhex@lemmy.world
        4·
        14 hours ago

        I don’t know if I was lucky or my needs were simpler but moving to Linux for me was a breeze… and that was like 15 years ago