Hi everyone, looking to make the switch from windows. I’m reasonably technically apt but not a programmer by any means. I’ve been doing some homework on which distro I would like to use and pop_os kinda feels like the right direction. I’m running an Nvidia 3060TI on a Ryzen 5600 chip set on an Asus tuf motherboard. Any other distros I should be looking at, and does somebody have a link for a comprehensive guide to installing? I’m looking to continue running windows on the side until such a time as I am comfortable enough with linux that I don’t need it.
IT’S DONE! Went and got myself a new SSD this afternoon and put POP!_OS on it. Looks like I got it all right but I can only boot into my Windows11 side through the BIOS. I tried all the GRUB commands but apparently after more reading GRUB isn’t used in pop 22.04. Any other ways to have a selection screen of some sort for the OS I want to boot rather than having to wait for the splash and frantically hit “F2” at the right time?
There are few things I’d suggest more than keeping Windows and Linux installations WELL separated. I’ve had windows update EFI entries for the whole system more than once, leaving the linux OS unbootable.
This is perfectly fixable, but take the win and leave well enough alone imo.
If you’re on ext4, you could also simply refind.
get flatseal, stick with flatpaks from your app manager. use keepass for your passcodes and syncthing to sync everything. have fun!
There is a section here on dual booting using systemd boot. Never used it, but it will hopefully work in your case, or at least point you the right way.https://ostechnix.com/dual-boot-windows-and-pop-os/
POP!_OS apparently uses systemd-boot (not to be confused with systemd). It apparently adds a Windows entry automatically if Windows is installed on the same disk. When Windows is installed on a different disk, it looks like booting the windows boot manager EFI program is still possible with systemd-boot. The instructions given in that link are a bit vague, though.
This page has a different, simpler approach and more specific steps. Apparently you can just copy the Microsoft EFI folder to a specific directory in your Linux drive’s ESP partition. I’d be a little bit concerned about Windows not being able to update its EFI bootloader, but I also don’t know if Windows ever updates that. The page also has instructions on how to interact with the systemd-boot menu during boot.
You could also install grub yourself, but I can’t guarantee that’ll be easy. Mashing F2 might be the sanest solution, unless you plan on booting into Windows every day.
If you want to dual boot Windows, do yourself a favor and get a second SSD to run Linux from. It’ll save you a lot of headaches.
PopOS is a solid choice. Other good choices are Mint or Zorin. But don’t sweat it too much. Just pick something and go with it. Once you get into it more, you’ll either know exactly what you want or you’ll stop caring.
I’ve been dual booting between Linux and Windows for maybe 10 years or so (and tinkered with linux growing up before that). I think maybe similar to you, I’m technically apt when it comes to computers but not a programmer; I’m good at problem solving issues with my computer and am not afraid to “break” it.
A few key things:
- Make sure your important personal data, files etc are kept secure and always backed up. This is probably obvious, but it does lower the threshold for tinkering and messing with the computer. I’ve reinstalled Windows and Linux multiple times; whether that’s getting round broken Windows updates, or Linux issues or just switching up which Linux distro I use. If you are confident you have your data backed up, then reinstalling an OS is not a big deal
- Use multiple drives; don’t just partition one drive. Ideally each OS gets it’s own SSD; this will make dual booting much easier and also allows complete separation of issues. I have 4 hard drives in my PC currently - A 1TB C Drive SSD for Windows, a 500 GB Linux SSD drive, and two 4TB data drives (one is SSD one is just a standard HD). SSD is faster but you can of course use a mechnical drive if you want.
- When it comes to dual booting, if you have a separate linux hard drive, then linux will only mess around with it’s own boot sectors. It will just point at the Windows boot sector on the windows hard drive and not touch it but add it as an option to it’s boot menu. Then all you have to do is go into your Bios and tell it to boot the Linux drive first, which will get you a boot menu to chose between Linux and Windows. Tinker with that boot menu (Grub2 usually) - I set mine to always boot the last OS selected, so I only have to think about the boot menu when I’m wanting to switch. Separate drives saves you having to mess around with Windows recovery disks if things go wrong with the boot sector. One drive with a shared or multiple boot sectors can be messy.
- Try a few Distros using their live images. Most Linux distros you flash onto a USB stick, boot onto that (OR use VirtualBox in Windows to try Linux in an emulated environment) and it takes you into the full desktop environment running from the stick. You can then install from that. But you can also use linux that way. You can even run linux entirely from those USB sticks (or an external drive) and get a feel for it, including installing more apps, upgrading etc all using the USB stick as storage.
- Also try a few different different desktop environments and get a feel for which one you like. Most distros default to a desktop environment (Gnome, KDE, Cinnamon, etc). You only really need to test the desktop environments with one distro as they’ll feel mostly the same in each distro.
If you know you want to use Pop_OS, then follow their guide on how to install. It’s generally very similar for all linux OSs (there are other methods but this is the simplest and most common):
- Download a disk image (ISO)
- Flash the disk image onto a spare USB stick. Balena Etcher is a very commonly used tool for this.
- Restart your computer and go into your bios (usually the Del key just after reboot, sometimes Escape or F2) and change the boot order to that USB is 1st, above your hard drives
- Insert the USB stick and restart the computer
- You should load into the Linux live environment set up by that distro. Pop_OS loads you directly into the installer; you can go to the desktop by clicking “Try Demo Mode” after setting up langauge and keyboard. You can just continue installing.
- Select the hard drive you want to install onto. BE CAREFUL at this step; most installers are good at making clear which drives are which. The last thing you want to do is wipe a data drive or your main OS. Know your computer’s drives well, and if in doubt the safest thing is to unplug all the hard drives except the one you’re going to install Linux onto.
- Follow the installer set up (to create the main user account, etc) and install.
- After installing reboot the system and go back into the bios. This time put your linux drive at the top of the boot order (or below USB if you still want to boot other live images - remember to take out the stick! But generally more secure to boot to a hard drive and password protect your bios so people can only boot to USB when you decide). That’s it! Reboot, and select linux from the new boot menu.
Linux has come a very long when it comes to installing and setting up; installers are generally easy to use, work well and generally hardware is recognised and set up for you. The exception will be the Nvidia graphics card - you will need to set up the Nvidia drivers. Pop_OS’s install guide shows how to do it.
Hope that helps! Run out of characters!
To answer your questions:
When it comes to other distros; I currently use Linux Mint with KDE Plasma desktop. The debian/ubuntu ecosystem is pretty easy to use and there are lots of guides out there for fixing/tinkering with Linux Mint (or Ubuntu which largely also works) because of their popularity. Lots of software is available as “.deb” packages which can be installed easily on Linux Mint and other Debian based systems including Ubuntu.
I’ve also been trying Nobara on a living room PC; that is Fedora based. I like that too, although it has a very different package manager set up.
Whatever distro you choose, Flatpak is an increasingly popular way of installing software outside the traditional package managers. A flatpak should just work on any distro. I would not personally recommend Snap which is a similar method from Cannonical (the people behind Ubuntu) but not as good in my opinion.
In terms of desktop environments, I like Linux Mint’s Cinnamon desktop, but have moved over to KDE having decided I prefer it after getting used to it with the Steam Deck. KDE has a windows feel to it (although it’s very customisable and can be made to look like any interface). I’ve also used some of the lightweight environments like LXDE, XFCE etc - they’re nice and also customisable but not as slick. You can get a nice look on a desktop with a good graphics card with KDE. The only desktop environment I personally don’t like is Gnome 3 (and the Unity shell from Ubuntu); that may just be personal preference but if you’re coming from Windows I wouldn’t start with that desktop environment - it’s too much of a paradigm shift in my opinion. However it is a popular desktop environment.
Welcome aboard! There is no need to be a programmer to work on Linux. I’m no programmer either and have been enjoying Linux for many years.
About the distro, it’s a conversation ad old as the first fork lol. It depends in part what you want to do with it. I’ve used many in 20+ years. I’ve settled eith endeavourOS for my desktop (after a few years of Linux Mint) and debian on the servers. I play and work on it without any problems (although I have a radeon rx580 card).
I’ve never used popOS, but all major distros have a fairly simple install process, especially if you use the whole hd and don’t need fancy config. Or you can start relatively hard and use gentoo. It will take a while (and thanks the fact that stage1 is not the default anymore) but you’ll learn a lot of how linux works.
Feel free to ask if you want to know more.
I think I need to give endeavourOS another try (I played around very briefly in a VM), I always see good things about it.
if you don’t mind having to install updates every day it’s nice. I use Cinnamon and there was a small issue at the beginning (dbus-something IIRC) so some apps (calculator, firefox, libreoffice) were taking a long time to start (waiting on a timemeout on something). But that’s the only issue I had in the past 6 months. I installed lutris and play steam and Epic games. I have docker (not the desktop version) installed. System is lean and snappy. Do I see a massive change from when I was using Linux Mint? Not really. I changed because I borked my LM installation and needed to reinstall anyway. Installed EndeavourOS on a spare SSD to try it out and ended as my daily driver. I still have LM on the other SSD, but I only went back once to transfer my documents/stuff. TBH I tried it out because I saw everyone banging on about Arch, but couldn’t be bothered to install from scratch. I’d only used RedHat or Debian derivative (I’m old, Ubuntu is a derivative of Debian in my mind because I remember how it started out) distros in the past 20+ years (well, and gentoo for some time when it first came out. Also Mandrake, but can’t remember what package manager it had), so I wanted to try something new. I’m happy with it, but I don’t make the distro I use a matter or religion. It works, it’s stable, I learn something new, job done.
