this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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I want to jump to linux, but the prospect of starting from scratch on a new OS (or even a reinstall of windows) is just not feasible right now.
Dual boot? I used to do this before moving my daily driver over. Haven't looked back since.
I've though about it, I might just wait until I need to upgrade my platform and therefore need to reinstall anyway. Does Intel vs AMD and Nvidia vs AMD even really matter anymore btw?
AMD gpus has better support but many have had decent experience with nVidia cards too. Cpu it doesn't matter afaik.
Nvidia will probably get better in the future (2024+) due to some great work being done on the open source driver. So as you say, I would also recommend AMD unless you rly need Nvidia for something specific like developing for RTX or something. I have recently gotten my Nvidia 2070 eGPU to work after many hours of debugging, while all my AMD cards work out of the box.
Only if you're concerned with gaming on Linux. Nvidia drivers aren't open source so it's a bit of a finagle to have Linux utilize Nvidia GPUs to their fullest. Otherwise it shouldn't be a huge deal. I prefer AMD because the drivers are wrapped up into the kernel so I've never had issues. But intel does have quicksync capabilities which is pretty nice for plex stuff. Otherwise nah
I'm in the process of getting my hands on a cheap laptop to at least use Linux so the eventual transition is easier, though.
Old Thinkpads make great Linux laptops with almost all models having all drivers working out of the box. Any model sufficiently new will work much better than any new laptop in the same price category. They also have great ports, replaceble batteries, screen, keyboards, ram, ssd and so on. I have a X250 and my wife have an T440s.
Buy anything newer then this (40 is my recommended minimum) if u want to use them as daily driver:
X440 (the smaller 13 inch laptops start with X)
T440 (14 inch, top of the class performance vs sleekness)
L440 (14 inch, don't know what's special here)
W540 (15 inch, workstation)
Some models can end with an S or P, example T440S. S models are thinner, P models are more powerful.
Just search your local marketplaces for "ThinkPad" then look for a picture of the screen and you will see the model number in the bottom left corner. ThinkPads have a red nob on the keyboard, so if the picture don't have a nob, you can flick past it quicker 😉
You can even get one with the wrong keyboard layout and just replace it, they have so many replacement parts on ebay you can build one from scratch if you wanted. I replaced my keyboard to get backlighting and my screen to get 1920*1080 on a x250 I got for about 125 Dollar.
PS: don't get a E variant, they are the budget variants with way worse build quality.
Edit: formatting
Tl;Dr: it's not as hard as you think.
I just jumped over to Linux in June. I booted into the Debian Live USB with KDE Plasma as the desktop environment. In general, make sure you have an Ethernet connection available for the first install. I basically tried it out in the live environment for a few days and I fell in love with it, in particular KDE Plasma. I picked Debian because I prefer not to update my PC very often (or at all on my music production computer), plus I had a nice time with the Raspberry Pi, which uses a derivative of Debian. If I really need the absolute newest version of any specific software, I have no problem installing it from a .deb and I can usually compile from source if the project is decently documented, but if you absolutely do not want to do that, you might want to pick a different distro. Whatever distro you pick, you'll be able to install KDE Plasma later. KDE had all the features I actually liked from Windows 10, but just better and more customizable. You can really make KDE work for almost any workflow.
I ended up installing it onto my music PC in a dual-boot configuration with my existing Windows 7 install. Unfortunately, I cannot afford to migrate my music production projects off Windows 7 because I was sloppy over the course of a decade with project directory structures and multiple drives, so I probably can't move these projects to any OS until I put in a few weeks of work to actually organize all those files. Oh well; everything else can work with Linux.
I've gotten pretty far so far by just installing Wine and Proton and using my existing Windows programs through those compatibility layers.
I also dropped Debian onto my school/work laptop in a dual-boot configuration with Windows 10. Except for the background, which I decided to make different, KDE is almost indistinguishable from Windows 10 until I start to use it, which reminds me how much nicer KDE is to use.
Most distros have live USBs with easy installers that make the whole process really painless. I basically installed Debian in the background while watching TV (Invidious), all inside the live install.
I also put Debian with LXQT on the remains of my old highschool PC, basically just a motherboard with integrated graphics, RAM, CPU, and case; no hard drive, no external graphics. I just put Debian onto a microSD card [1] and told the BIOS to look there for bootable drives. No commitment. As much as I love KDE, it does require non-trivial resources to exist. Since that hardware is over a decade old now, I really can't afford to give any of it to a desktop environment.
So if you really can't commit to Linux, you can slap it onto a large microSD and tell your BIOS/UEFI to boot it. It's a little slower than putting on a drive, but sufficient to give Linux an extended test-drive.
You could also try installing it in a virtual machine. Linux plays very nicely with Virtualbox. I picked LXQT for my old PC by installing a virtual machine with Debian and installing a bunch of desktop environments onto the system. Then, I cut back the number of cores, processor speed, and RAM available to see how they acted.
My point is, I really think it's a good idea to try Linux now. It really will not take very long to get a great, usablr system, and you can make it yours by making little changes as you go along.
[1] Meaning, I used a live install USB to install to a separate microSD card. A live install loads the entire OS and any programs you install into RAM. In general, the content of the live USB isn't changed, and it's difficult to do so. What I did was to treat the microSD card as a hard drive and install a normal system.
Not much lighter than kde outside of ram usage. (consider lxde, or just a wm)
See that's what I thought, and that's what I got from simulating both systems in the virtual machine, but on my particular hardware LXQT ran a tad bit faster. I tried a few straight-up WM's but I didn't like them. On my main PC, which is about five years old, LXQT ran about as fast as KDE and LXDE was predictably wicked fast.
I'm reinstalling Linux onto a legitimate hard drive (it was on a microSD). I'll install both again and see what happens. Although really, I just need enough to run TeamViewer so I can control my other machines from there.
If you don't want to start from scratch just use it but don't install it on the pc!
You can get familiar with the os by trying it on a virtual machine or in a live usb, and the windows partition will always remain untouched!