I have an interesting question for everyone. I currently run windows 11 on a Raider GE76 gaming laptop however I am interested in dual booting linux as well. Additionally I am a beginning computer science major who hasn't used linux since I was running Ubuntu around 13 years ago and presently don't really have any idea of what has come into existence since. All that being said, which distribution do you all think I should select to begin my re-immersion and why would you select that one?
don't dual boot. i assume this laptop came with windows pre-installed. so it's already allocated the full disk capacity to existing partitions unless you're installing a second drive, there's a good chance of messing up your system drive, including the recovery partition (windows re-install files), and/or the bootloader. you may completely destroy windows and not be able to recover it. even installing a second drive and having linux installed on that, there's still a chance of messing up the bootloader and not being able to boot either windows or linux. use WSL2 instead.. you just run linux from within windows itself. from the cli, you won't notice anything different.. getting gui applications to run was more complicated, but i believe that is a lot easier now. you won't get the full linux desktop, with background, launcher, etc. but you'll still get any linux gui app running in it's own window, fully movable and resizable, in your windows gui, alongside all your windows applications. it would be much easier/simpler for you to manage than dual booting. you can even run multiple different versions of linux, or even multiple copies of the same linux os.. so if you want to try experimenting with something but not risk messing up your default linux environment, just install another copy of it in WSL2, try things out.. then remove it afterwards.. the easiest linux for beginners is (my opinion) probably debian based, you could go with debian itself. i prefer ubuntu.
Why not using VirtualBox for this task? You can install this on your Laptop and testing linux distribution, of your choice. (Sorry, my english is not very good.)
Delete Windows and run Linux! JK use whatever suites best for your use case. WSL, VM or Dualboot are all possible options. I would recommend a distribution that is well supported and has lots of help/tutorials/articels/videos online which would be something debian/ubuntu based or even debian/ubuntu itself. But that depends on what you prefer. You could install openSUSE or even Arch if you need/like fresher packages. That latter comes with a bit more tricky installation process, but it's not that hard nowadays and there are even distros based on it with GUI installers.
I appreciate all the feedback everyone, I have been using VMware for a few months now and it has been a fairly reasonable way of going about interacting with the Linux environment so i will probably continue doing so for now and build a dedicated rig to be a Linux machine in the future. Thank you again all
I recommend starting with Ubuntu or Linux Mint. Both are user-friendly, have strong community support, and are great for beginners. Ubuntu is widely used and reliable, while Linux Mint offers a more traditional desktop experience. Both are based on Ubuntu, making them easy to install and maintain for dual-booting with Windows 11.
