Hello, I have recently built an AM5 pc and loaded Windows 11 onto it. I have two M.2 SSDs setup with RAID 0, through the UEFI.
I want to install dual boot a Linux distro to try and play games on it, because I prefer Linux to Windows.
From where I am with W11 and RAID 0 setup, how can I dual boot Arch, for example?
Should I (can I) partition my RAID0 drive?
I’m a software engineer, and I know my way around Bash have some familiarity with Linux- mostly Debian. My understanding of how very low leveled stuff happens on my computer is very incomplete though, hence why I ask for help.
If you recommend something that’s not Arch, I’m happy to try it, though.
Typing commands into a terminal and administrating a system are very different beasts. Arch gets a bit of a bad rep, but it very much still considers a desktop to be a “linux system” rather than “a computer”. Ubuntu and Mint tend to be pretty far on the other side of the spectrum as they do their best to make things seamless to the user and put the vast majority of (pertinent) config settings in GUIs and the like.
On its own? Looking up what to run and how to fix problems is not the end of the world. But a lot of the greybeards out there will insist on ONLY answering the specific question asked and nothing related. So you either need to end up cross referencing and researching twelve different aspects of an answer that MAYBE is correct, or you are bowing and asking for help so that said greybeard will paste the rest of the answer they held off on to feel good about themselves. ChatGPT goes a LONG way toward avoiding this, but you still have the “so… is this even correct?” problem that you only really learn from experience and “thinking like a linux distro”
I already suggested Manjaro if you really like Arch but want something more user oriented. But your best bet is to just go browse “linux getting started” on youtube and watch a few videos on the install and configuration process for various distros. You’ll obviously find people who insist you need to be doing manual systemd calls and doing
sudo emacsfor every config file in Ubuntu, but this should give you a good idea of what the “philosophy” of each distro is. Which then lets you figure out which one(s) you want to try.Personally? All servers should be Debian or some form of RHEL. As a desktop, I used to use Mint but went back to Ubuntu a year or two back. I don’t want to be a sysadmin when all I want to do is play some games or watch some media and most of my work is on servers or involves manually building out dependencies anyway. But everyone is different and that is the beauty of linux. Hell, you can even be a complete psychopath and insist on using BSD instead (not sure how that works with Steam though).
And if you set up your partitions (or just drives) correctly, changing distros is a 20 minute process with zero data loss. I mean, I am increasingly looking at alternatives because the Ubuntu snap obsession is increasingly pissing me off. Not a huge deal, but also… changing distros is not a huge deal.