Rather than trying to muck with dual booting, I would recommend picking up a Lenovo T430S or better laptop on Amazon from around 150.00-500.00. Lenovo ThinkPad T series laptops are incredibly well supported by Linux. Then install Linux Mint. This is a great way to get started with a low barrier to entry. As you get better, you can start tinkering with the innards. By getting a cheap spare machine with which to learn Linux on, it will be the least disruptive to you.

• Recommended distribution coming from Windows: Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition. linuxmint.com Why? Very consistent over many versions, no experiments, comfortable, very classic Windows-like desktop. Actually amazingly designed and very helpful “welcome” tool after installation, to help new users set up the system well. The Mint team develops and maintains useful and cool applications. Based on Ubuntu, so most problems you can web-search for both Mint or Ubuntu and find solutions. It’s based on the long-term-support version of Ubuntu, so it gets 5 years of security updates for each version. It has Flatpak enabled by default, which is a modern, widely accepted software container format, so programs can run independently of the distribution. Flatpaks are more up to date than traditional packages from a distribution’s software repositories. With things like gaming, you want the latest software to benefit from new features, enhancements and compatibiliy, so make use of Flatpak for your applications where possible.

• Easy tool to write a .ISO or .IMG file to a USB stick in order to boot Linux from it: Balena Etcher or Fedora Media Writer (it can write other images than Fedora too and lets you format / restore the USB stick with a single button, great tool).

• Definitely back up all your files on at least a large USB stick, but better an external HDD or SSD (USB sticks might at some point become corrupt or break, they are not as reliable). Having your pictures, documents, videos, etc. always on an external disk means you can easily reinstall any OS and just copy your stuff over. Update this backup from time to time. This will give you the safety net to confidently discover and experiment.

• If you have only one computer, prepare a Windows installation USB stick before your Linux adventures, just in case something breaks and you want to repair it or go back to Windows.

• Dual boot can be annoying, and sometimes one OS may ruin the bootloader of another. I recommend a separate machine, or at the very least a separate physical SSD per OS.

• Don’t try to make Windows applications work on Linux unless you absolutely have no other alternative and choice but to use them. Pretty much anything you may be used to is either available as a Flatpak, a traditional package in the distro’s repository or has great open source or Linux-compatible alternatives. Learn to web-search for those alternatives and install them from the software center app that comes with your distro. On Linux, you don’t have to go to websites and download setup files. Everything sits inside a giant software repository and gets updated along with your OS when you look for updates. A Linux Distribution has a repository for its own packages, and Flatpak containers come from a separate repository, most commonly flathub.org. On desktop-centric distributions, you get appstore-like graphical tools to search, install, remove and update everything from one place.

• If you absolutely have to make a Windows app work on Linux, have a look at “Bottles”. It’s a UI that makes it a bit easier and more comfortable to work with the Windows compatibility layer called WINE.

• Don’t try to search for driver setups on websites unless something really doesn’t work. Most common hardware is supported out of the box, as a ton of general purpose drivers are shipped with the distro as kernel modules already. If you have a Nvidia GPU, expect some issues and consider buying AMD graphics in the future. AMD drivers are inside the Linux kernel these days and open source, whereas Nvidia has a history of not cooperating with the open source crowd, so the open drivers are reverse-engineered, hacky, not-so-great solutions. Desktop-focused distributions like Ubuntu, Linux Mint or Pop! OS have built-in tools to easily enable / select proprietary Nvidia drivers. For gaming, they are pretty much required. On other distros that don’t offer this comfort, you’ll have to manually install the proprietary Nvidia drivers and that is a nightmare, likely to brick your system on your first few attempts. With AMD or Intel graphics, you don’t have to do anything, they just work.

• If you’re a German reader, you’re in luck. There is an amazing, free online book if you really want to dive deep into Linux: https://openbook.rheinwerk-verlag.de/linux/ Unfortunately, I don’t know an english equivalent, if you know one, please link it to me.

• In case you might be a PC gamer, you’ll likely have a Steam account. Valve does an amazing job, they take the Windows compatibility layer WINE, add some magic to it, the result is called Proton. To enable it, you just have to go to the Steam settings - Compatibility - Enable Steam Play for all other titles. You can now simply install and run Windows games, thousands of them just work and the list grows continously. See protondb.com to check which game works or might have issues and how to fix them. For other places like GOG, Epic, Ubisoft, etc. check out Lutris. It’s a very cool launcher that helps you set up all these accounts in one place. Advanced tip: a guy called Glorious Eggroll patches things into Proton that Valve can’t add for licensing reasons and offers improved, unofficial Proton versions called GE-Proton. If you have issues getting a game to run with the normal Proton versions, GE-Proton might make a difference. A neat little tool to install GE-Proton is “ProtonUp-Qt”: https://flathub.org/de/apps/net.davidotek.pupgui2

I would go from the bottom up instead of top down.

Make a list of software and tools you use, and search for functional Linux native equivalents. Then find the distro that supports up to date versions of that software (through flatpak or the package manager).

You can honestly do 100% of this without even touching the command line if you choose something user friendly like Mint, Pop OS, Ubuntu, or Fedora. Don’t fall into the rabbit hole of finding the perfect distro. Go from what you need to what supports it.

keep the windows partition around for a while until you are 100% confident you can fully make the switch.

Dual booting can be problematic. Windows is the most retarded OS ever which sometimes decides to overwrite boot partition.
FOr trying out stuff, you van install Linux as a virtual machine. Check there if your sw works there and is available.

Pop OS is a good beginner friendly Linux distro. Like Ubuntu, it is also debian based. This would make it easier to get used to for you since you have some experience with Ubuntu.

I’m a middle-aged truck driver. I’ve been using Linux Mint (Cinnamon) now for about seven years as my only operating system (without dual booting) since Windows XP Pro became totally obsolete. Granted, I’m a hobbyist programmer and lifelong computer enthusiast. However, there are definitely some easy to install and use distros out there these days.

General tips:

• Don’t look for Linux versions of the Windows software you use. Instead look for software that fulfils the same purpose.
• If you’re cutting-and-pasting a lot of stuff from those articles, give yourself a check on what those things actually do. See it as a small investment of time to economise time later on, as you’ll rely less and less on those articles.
• Stick to popular distros. And for the desktop environment (DE), use whatever works for you.
• Keep it easy. It’s fine if you need to log into Windows once in a while, but over time you’ll notice yourself doing it less and less.

I love when people switch on the same machine and experience a performance boost. They finally start to understand all my under breath muttering about hating windows and it’s geriatric bloatware.

Not a pro take here … but when I was playing with various distros back in early 2001-03 I favoured Ubuntu, simply because it was the most user friendly (still have an old laptop duel-booted with it).

distrowatch.com is a good place to look around and check out what’s new and true to your needs.

The old-style web page is the same as it was in 2001; brings back good memories. :)

Kubuntu or Mint are great distro’s to begin with when starting your linux journey. It’s good to know down the road these should really be moved on from, but they’re great to get the ball rollin for sure!

First thing: Ubuntu is the right choice. As far as I’m aware, having run Linux as my main desktop OS for almost a decade and playing with several flavors (…which includes Arch btw 😎), it’s the most polished out of the box desktop experience for someone completely new. It will also likely be the OS with the most Q&A existing on the web for problems you won’t be the first to have encountered.

Secondly, and maybe this should be first, and it sounds like you’ve already got this part down: you have to want to do this. Linux is just not mainstream for the majority of desktop computer users. If you’re not really wanting to do this, you’ll be frustrated when this isn’t the same experience as Windows. (but it sounds like you’re sick of the Windows experience. That’s what started me into Linux years ago.)

Lastly, as far as my quick Lemmy comment goes: Embrace the terminal! You can get around for a while as a Linux n00b on Ubuntu without opening that terminal, but at the end of the day, the *nix shell commands are what make working with Linux great.

The switch will take time. You’ll occasionally need to look up how to do stuff that may have felt simple in Windows… and that will usually be installing and running software that targets Windows only. However, the support for that sort of stuff gets better and better with time. Wine🍷 has come a long way.

It’s worth the journey IMO. For me, I was a PC gamer and I jumped straight into Linux with 0 experience. I learned a lot, spending a lot of time trying to make my Windows games run on Linux. Friends at LAN parties would joke about how I’d spend half the LAN party trying to get my games to run right.

The jokes were a good laugh, but my career shifted since then and my Linux experience carried right over into software development. Everything I deploy is on Linux servers or in Docker containers. All those years fooling around and tinkering with Linux as a PC gamer were loading me with experience that people would pay me for one day.

Good luck! 🐧

Would start off with linux mint cinnamon edition, imo it is the easiest way to transition to linux, and dont be afraid to play around with linux. Go make mistakes, it is the best way to learn from

This may not work for everyone, but the only way to truly embrace Linux was to wipe the windows partition and start using Linux. That’s it, you no longer have to option to run back to your dual booted Windows if shit doesnt work. You sit down and figure it out.

You’ve had some good advice here already, all I’d add is that you should install the package tldr as it’s a very noob-friendly accessible version of man pages (the manuals which come with every piece of software on Linux).

If you can, find another old computer that still works, maybe replace the mechanical hard drive with a solid state drive and install Linux Mint or even the new Debian 12. I have Debian running on an old computer with an Intel i5-2500k processor and it is rock solid. As far as learning linux, I recommend https://www.learnlinux.tv/ as a starting point. Jay is very good at explaining.