I will suggest Linux Mint for a newbie friendly distro. Gparted is the preferred tool for partitioning. But, there may be a BIOS compatibility mode with the system. That requires GPT partitioning and a EFI partition where Windows puts the bootloader. If your laptop is newer (2012 and later), may be your OS is installed in UEFI mode. I have already created a new drive for Linux. Just thinking if I would mess up while dual booting! :what: I am in love with the elementary OS and hence downloaded and stored it in a flash drive. I have already used Fedora so wanted to try something new.Īs mentioned, I am keeping Windows 10. I will try tp upgrade my RAM, let's keep fingers crossed. I am dual booting indeed, after the hassle I had to face while downloading Windows 10. Customer(OS user) expects full support after buying OS. With Windows/Microsoft it is a client-seller relationship. But, less chances of becoming mainstream OS due to the fact that those who have a mindset to explore and learn and also open to DIY stuff will find Linux or *BSD's interesting. Linux has indeed matured over these years. Today, we hardly need to do all these things. XF86 configuration editing modeline etc and recompiling kernels regularly, rebuilding packages are some of the things I recollect. Forgot to add: WinModems are a big headache to get it to work in Linux.Įven SCSI/SATA drives were not supported during those days with 2.4.x kernel. But, for the past 7-8 years, it is either Debian or Ubuntu on my systems. Gentoo, Arch, Foresight/ipath Linux (with Conary package management system) and many other distros. During those awful dialup days, I used to get Debian CD's(20 numbers or so) from a student in Bombay IIT. Debian Woodie was released immediately afterwards. I started using Linux in 2001-2, with RH 7.2 or so. They've installed earlier version of RedHat Linux (circa 1998) on some of the computers for unknown reason. My first experience with Linux was in the computer labs set up by HCL in our Engineering college. But, even today I use terminal because it gets the work done straightforward. Terminal usage was ofcourse the norm as you need to configure something or the other. One thing I noticed in the last few months I used Lubuntu is, I hardly launched xterm. Went on to Debian, Mepis (at university), Gentoo (stage 1 install in extremely bored single days in Bangalore), (K)Ubuntu for a little while. Started off with Redhat 7.3 back in 2002-3. Would be great to hear about any other good distros whose experience has been good by other forum members! Although GNOME3 had mucked it up pretty good for most of us when it was released, prompting a mass exodus to Unity. My choice of desktop, however, after trying multiple times with OpenSuse and kubuntu and Chakra remains the GNOME and Unity frontend rather than KDE4. For the casual user, Ubuntu has come a long way from the original days and the current Dashboard and Unity interface is quite robust and easy to use. Since that time have tried Fedora Core multiple versions, OpenSuse for a change, Linux Mint for a stable period of time (my parents still use it), Ubuntu from its 9.04 days (my wife's laptop was running the 14.04 Trusty Tahr till a few months back), and finally Arch Linux for my needs.īetween all the versions and flavours selected, for an intermediate user, Arch Linux gives flexibility and ease of use. Have been an open source user since 2003, when fedora and Red Hat were the options. Even iptables/firewall needed to be enabled manually. Those who want a Debian system without the need to rebuild some packages to enable xyz features will want to try LMDE. The DE is Cinnamon which is pretty simple compared to Gnome-Shell or Kde. LMDE 2 actually is a mix and match distro with Debian Jessie as the primary system. With systemd, I believe the boot process is faster. LMDE 2 offers classic sysvinit and systemd options for booting. Some general tweaks for SSD like mounting /var/tmp, /tmp directories in RAM and nodiratime option for filesystems in /etc/fstab are the only things I did after the install. Since there is no other OS installed, the process was smooth. I chose UEFI mode in BIOS setup and created GPT partition table with the help of gdisk. Wanted to try LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) for long time, so installed it from a usb drive. Actually, these drives were lying there untouched for years! until I thought of upgrading last week. I've recently upgraded my desktop to a 180GB Intel 330 SSD and 1 tb WD Blue hard drive for data backup.
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