This is my third attempt. Partly to rage quit Windows, and partly to gain utility and control with some professional AV software.
I have converted an old Asus netbook to Ubuntu netbook remix and used it for a while. I was impressed with how much better that tiny thing ran with Linux than Windows. But in the end it still had less power than a TI-84. So I stopped using it, and never really learned Linux proper.
I dual boot my Chromebook, so I can use gimp for photos on vacation, but everything I do with the Linux partition is cut and paste from articles by people who know what they’re doing. (I was motivated to post here by a meme about that.)
I’m thinking of dual booting my main desktop, because I need Windows for some fairly processor intense A/V software I use for work. So what would be a good distro to look into for a novice and where should I look for a tutorial? I would ultimately like to see if I can use Linux to run my AV software in emulation and add drivers for some professional audio interfaces. I’m fed up with windows and trying to see how far I can get without it. Your help is appreciated in advance, and if this is inappropriate for this topic, let me know and I’ll delete it.
My advice is to restart with Arch (I use Arch btw). Not Manjaro, I’m talking Arch.
I think using/installing Arch as well as its barebones nature FORCES you to understand how Linux works differently than Windows with concepts like root, bootloader, terminal emulation, and disk partitioning, just to give you some examples. At the same time, Arch has excellent documentation, a great package manager in pacman, and rolling release model that greatly simplifies maintainance during daily use so you can tune it to exactly how you want it.
I believe doing it the hard way at first will make it easier for you in the long run if you really want to understand Linux, and Arch is just the right amount of difficult to make you learn Linux, whereas Gentoo would be too hard and you don’t learn enough from using Ubuntu/Debian/Mint.
But yeah, if you just want to use something that works well out of the box, then Ubuntu is great, there’s nothing wrong with using the more user friendly distros.
I’m a long time Linux user but I’m really lazy. I recently installed Arch to try it out again as last time I did it was maybe 2012. Personally, manually setting up the hard drive partitions on initial install is just annoying enough to be too much work (I have a lot of drives) but luckily there’s an installer that does that part for you. Everything else you have to do is sensible and easy and actually ends up being less work in the long run. The wiki is also extremely informative, helpful and correct.
Arch probably can be a beginner distro just because if you have a problem it’s so much easier to find out how to fix it on the internet thanks to the wiki and the forums. Something as mundane as installing nvidia drivers in Debian can be a massive ordeal and the minimum required skill level to fix it yourself if it doesn’t work on the first attempt is very high.