Long overdue, I know, but looking to start at least partially migrating and working with Dual boot, coming from Windows 10 (putting off 11 as much as possible)…

I have limited Linux experience, mostly in college several years back.

I work remotely with Windows software development, including Winforms, Asp.net, .net core, etc. Not sure what I need to best work with these, particularly Winforms. That may not even be possible, I know.

Looking for any general guidance/recommendations.

Long term, I’m interested in migrating as much as possible, outside of whatever I have to keep up for work… starting with dual boot options then moving towards linux as a primary driver. I have an old media server (also win10, not win11 compatable) not really doing much but running plex when I need it… would love to also eventually poke around with Home Assistant or similar, maybe some LLM tinkering etc.

If this isn’t a good community for this, I apologize, and please point me to a better one if you know of one.

  • @ssm
    1•5 months ago

    Recommendation from a guy who started on Arch (bad mistake). I never dabbled in Ubuntu/Mint/PopOS/whatever so I don’t know how to recommend those, so take that very large grain of salt.

    • You want Windows/MacOS but the same
      • Debian/Devuan
        • Pick an image that comes with a default desktop environment of your choosing.
        • Once you figure out the package manager it’s easy sailing.
          • Caveat emptor, haven’t had to set up Nvidia on this.
    • You can read instructions and follow them
      • Void Linux
        • Nvidia is trivial to set up.
        • Like Arch, but stable.
        • No AUR, the official repositories are just good instead.
      • Alpine Linux
        • Uses musl libc.
          • Has no software because musl libc.
            • Flatpak and other runtimes can get around this, thankfully.
        • Busybox sucks, replace with coreutils immediately.
        • Install the docs metapackage if you want to have any clue what you’re doing.
    • You want to learn, maybe after you already had some experience
      • OpenBSD
        • The best documentation on the planet.
        • Not Linux, but a lot of the stuff you learn here can be applied to Linux.
        • Try to avoid 3rd party utilities and instead rely on the base system as much as possible.
        • No modern Nvidia driver, not even nouveau.
          • Display should at the very least still work with the vga(4) or efifb(4) drivers, but you’ll have no acceleration.
      • Gentoo
        • Don’t go too hard on the useflags or kernel config unless you want to have a bad time.
        • Honestly should be in the previous category if it wasn’t so easy to footgun yourself with one bad command or configuration.
          • This is where the learning part comes in
        • Stage 4 tarball is cheating.