I do understand what you are saying, but I can personally attest that being “forced” to use Linux will speed your acquisition of knowledge up, at least if you have the time to put into the effort.
With that said, I suggest a compromise. How about you carve one day out each week for “banning” the Windows VM and doing your best to get through the day? Of course, if you have to do something for work, that takes precedent.
I made the switch from Windows to Linux a few years back pretty painlessly by dual-booting. It’s a good solution because:
For downsides, you need two boot media or two partitions. It’s also harder to transfer files across, since Windows can’t read ext4 or other Linux-specific filesystems (although Linux can read Microsoft’s filesystems if you disable hibernation). Installation can also be tricky, as each OS likes to overwrite the MBR of the other. I recommend plugging in only one drive at a time if you go this route. People on this forum seem to prefer VMs, but dual-booting is also a valid option.
As for distro, just try a few. It’s strange; distro comparison seems like it should be fairly objective, but I find it’s actually highly subjective. Just try a few, and if you start to get settled on one, keep it. I use Mint myself; I get to follow all the Ubuntu troubleshooting advice on the internet, but with a UI that a prefer somewhat to Ubuntu’s. But some people here really hate Mint, and have problems with it that I’ve never dealt with in years; that’s just the way it is. I’ve learned most of what I know by tweaking little things in the OS, and you’ll get that experience whether you use a noob distro or Arch. Best of luck 
I did dual boot for years, but the problem is that it is all too tempting to just stay in Windows after you booted it to play a game. Which isn’t migrating away…
Also, if you don’t game that much, every time you reboot into windows you’ll have like 18 steam downloads, a windows update and 10 application updates to do. Fuck that.
Proton really is doing great things these days. It’s not perfect, but its better than dual boot in my opinion.
edit:
i just played wItcher 3 under linux for example, so there’s decent stuff you can play 
I’m gonna be honest, when you started writing about speaking Chinese, I didn’t really know where you were going.
I’m not saying don’t immerse yourself into Linux, I’m saying if you’re “too lazy” to learn things with respect to Windows, it doesn’t magically get easier with Linux.
Some people are really overselling the whole update thing. Every time I boot into Ubuntu I’m told the system needs a reboot. Sometimes packages break and there’s no easy or known fix. One time I ran an update on my Arch Linux system and the root partition (aka where everything is) was corrupted or deleted. To this day I don’t know. I’ve updated Fedora and graphics have been botched. I’ve not done any changes at all on a Linux system and random, odd, game breaking issues occur.
This isn’t fear monger or a scare tactic, but Linux enthusiasts either don’t remember how easy things on Windows or MacOS are, nor how good things look, or they’ve come to accept subpar systems as acceptable. Which is ironic, because supposedly the whole reason they left Windows/MacOS is because it was a subpar system.
A very recent example of this is an ongoing discussion among Jason Evangelho and some KDenLive enthusiasts/users/devs. He expresses frustrations and issues with stability and they responded with something along the lines of as long as they’re not importing, exporting, rendering, or opening the program, there shouldn’t be any stability issues!
So, basically, if I do anything besides edit the video, I can expect the program to crash and burn. And this is acceptable?
Side tangent and long rant, tl;dr – Use Linux, dive in head first, both feet in, and don’t look back. But don’t expect some smooth sailing with a cigar in your mouth and two 21 year old booth babes under each arm (total of 4 21 year old lady friends). More like the Harley chick that you just woke up to the morning after and can’t recall what led you to this point in time.
Good luck, have fun.
No worries, I was trying to give what I felt like was a good demonstration of ‘my learning style.’ I’m no expert, but I am under the impression that studies show different people learn things better in different ways. So–long story short–I’m just trying to outline what I believe would be ideal conditions for me (personally) to learn, and asking for help getting there.
I won’t lie and say I wouldn’t like for things to be “smooth sailing,” in your words. But, I am expecting for there to be headaches…
What I am hoping for, is help avoiding any initial headaches that would prevent me from getting to the ideal starting point I am describing and leave me defaulting to Windows yet again.
That’s why I was asking about things like motherboard compatibility and GPU passthrough, for example. Which I never got any direct feedback on unless I overlooked it. (Besides watching out for IOMMU grouping.)
Ending up with hardware that, quite literally, “just works” in Windows versus requiring a bunch of hurdles before I even get to a desktop environment is a pretty good example of a headache that would probably have me packing my bags.
“Smoothly sailing” through the initial setup, being able to have my computer stay on at a Linux desktop, and being able to boot up a Windows VM if I am annoyed with something not working the way I want… I believe this would leave me in an ideal situation to build off of and play around in Linux. I don’t know if I have failed to express this clearly, but that’s all I was particularly wanting to talk about here.
@thro
Re: Dual Booting - That’s a reasonable solution, but needing to actually restary the system is something I’m trying to avoid having to do. That’s literally my only reservation about doing it, although I have faced some of the minor headaches you mention trying to dual boot in the past. (Losing MBR, OSes not wanting to be on the same drive, Windows not seeing the filesystem, etc…)
To a large degree, I am mostly waffling over ‘aesthetic’ things here. I do recognize that. One of the motivators for me to get into Linux is to try controlling and playing with ‘aesthetic’ parts of my user experience. These things aren’t utilitarian so I get it if it seems trivial, I can’t say anything to that besides that it matters to me.
Have you installed something yet, or are we still deciding?
While KDEnlive is definitely crash-happy (to be fair, not so much with the recent versions, when not trying to use the Movit library and when I have QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb set, since KDE Plasma’s Wayland session is still rough around the edges), I wouldn’t say that I had any of the issues you outlined in your third paragraph. Your mileage may vary, I guess?
Anyway, yeah, the original poster should just, in my personal opinion, dive head-first into Linux desktop environments and workflows, since he will never be able to get something that translates well from (or to) Windows. As far as hardware goes, in my experience, you can easily work around most issues with a simple DuckDuckGo search and, at most, an hour on one’s time at most.
I’m not suggesting dual booting, i’m advising AGAINST it 
I haven’t installed anything yet, I haven’t built the system yet, which is when I’m planning to switch. My main concerns before buying hardware are if the motherboard will have any issues, and if comsumer-grade AMD cards are more friendly to virtualization than consumer-grade Nvidia cards. I guess I should also look into the differences between Arch and Debian branches and try to make an informed decision there?
But there’s also a few other things I wanna sort out before putting money into a new computer.
And my bad @thro, I was looking back through the comments while making the post but I had read them a while before that. I guess my reply was more pointed at @MrFigs.
Typically no, I had to do a UEFI update before Fedora or Arch would work. This was done through the UEFI menu and Windows was not needed. For some driver/AMD updates, Windows was needed but I’m sure that’s just for the OS layer stuff and not the hardware itself.
Allegedly. I read constant praise of the highest regard for AMD on Linux. I was and remain wholeheartedly underwhelmed and unimpressed. I’ll reiterate, the support that’s perpetuated for AMD among the Linux community is borderline myth – You have to install drivers, you have to install software, you will run into issues, etc. It doesn’t just work out of the box as most people sell it.
Your mileage may vary, of course. I have a vastly superior experience when using Nvidia on Fedora, Arch, Ubuntu (all flavors), Debian, and FreeBSD. My GPU passthrough experience was limited to an RX580 that is outdated at this point. From what I understand the issues I ran into have been remedied by modern software.
Arch uses the latest upstream packages that are available. From the Linux kernel to PHP and Zabbix. It also “syncs” rather than “updates”. So you’re all or nothing (there are ways around this) when doing an update, which can lead to unexpected results after an update. To be fair, that last bit can be applied to every operating system ever.
Debian’s development team, on the other hand, does not implement a new package until it has been thoroughly vetted and tested with respect to maximum stability. Debian is known as stable, but you’re also going to be a few versions behind most software releases compared to other distributions, usually. RHEL/CentOS follow a similar mantra.
Debian has various testing and “unstable” branches. Debian tested is what Ubuntu was based on, but it’s kind of evolved into it’s own thing. Linux Mint, ElementaryOS, NetRunner… I think all of those were influenced/forked from Ubuntu.
We’re getting into the weeds a bit, so I’ll say you’re going to be looking at both extremes on Linux. You’ll find a mix of everything in between.
Depends. Buy polaris or vega and they both work out of the box with any recent distribution.
Fedora 28 onward for Vega (Maybe earlier?), definitely earlier for Polaris.
I run both, i install no drivers. Bought both Polaris RX480 and Vega 64 on day of release. Both were supported within weeks.
Maybe if you’re running some ancient distribution you may need drivers. Don’t do that.
I don’t know what gen Polaris is, but screen tearing was awful on Fedora and Ubuntu with an RX 580.
Someone was running Debian in a thread not that long ago and they were given a list of packages to install.
I’d also get long shutdown countdowns saying that some c3 session was trying to terminate – A lot of people with AMD cards said that might be the issue. Audio was atrocious too.
Interesting, the 580 is actually the card I have my eyes on at the moment. My monitor is 4K, and I don’t feel like the 2080 Super justifies its price with its performance, so I’m planning to get a cheaper card from last generation and hold out for either a newer better card, or buy a current-gen card after the prices drop.
Also, because I’m in Taiwan, new parts are actually generally a little more expensive while older parts can randomly be really, really cheap.
I’m kind of hoping that I can use the same video card for my Linux desktop and for my VM. It doesn’t matter to me if the video card has to “drop” my Linux Desktop and its ‘connection’ to the monitor and be given solely to the VM, as long as it can be given back to Linux once the VM is closed.
I’m like 90% certain that Nvidia does everything in its power to make sure this does not work on their consumer-grade cards. From personal experience, so unless somethings changed since I was trying with a 750 Ti and a 980… Green cards just would be a bad time.
Can’t remember if i saw tearing on Ubuntu with Vega/Polaris, but i haven’t run it for a bit.
Have zero of these issues on Fedora - across RX550, RX480, Vega 64…
I had massive crashing problems with an RX550 on Centos 7. Both with and without the amdgpu-pro driver downloaded.
But Centos is ancient.
edit:
Actualy, I lie. I have my living room Pc running Ubuntu 19.04 with Vega 64 (forgot it was ubuntu). Runs fine, no tearing that i can remember. But i haven’t used it for a bit.
The 580 struggled to do low/medium 1440p. Just FYI.
See above, it wouldn’t be the first time I was an outlier on the Linux side of things. I had a Gigabyte board with 970 and then 580. Upgraded to 1080 and been there ever since. I went the AMD route because I heard such positive feedback about it. My experience was neutral.
I don’t remember the version off hand, but it was a couple of years ago. I had considered giving it another shot, but with the gaming experience on the 580 I just went back to the gre$$n team.
When I had a Windows VM with the 580 passed through it was cool. But VM shutdown was a nightmare. This was a while ago and I’ve been told that it’s been remedied.
Yeah, I know it’s roughly on par with the (proper) 1060 in my laptop. I’m hoping to either stay at a similar performance category… unfortunately it’s hard to make a good value upgrade (from my perspective) and stay on the red team. At least a 580 with a real cooler should be able to flex more than a 1060 with a thin-and-light laptop cooler trying to keep both the GPU and CPU cool at the same time.
To add to the above, if you’re looking for a 1440p card, Vega 56 and up. As above, Polaris will struggle. RX470/480/570/580 is amazing 1080p card for the money. But it just doesn’t have the rops to push 1440p or higher on most games.
On some titles like say, Doom 2016 it would no problem. But not most.
edit:
if you’re comparing and wanting something similar to a 1060… full fat polaris will get you there.
I’m willing to live with 1080p for a generation or two if I have to. But I’m also holding out hope that there’s some weird scaling solutions I can try playing with.
Granted, the shader tech on the 5700/XT does seem fun to play with. Not sure if that’s equally accessible on Linux. I just don’t think it’s possible for me to get a deal on one of those cards because of where I am.
Also, I mostly play older games anyways. Sometimes it’s fun to have a AAA experience, but the urge to do that is pretty uncommon for me.
Wise choice. I think we’re in this awkward middle ground at the moment where 1080p is a piece of cake for even lower-mid range cards, but the next steps (1440p and even more so, 4k) are not.
Depending what monitor you’re running on, i’d argue for 90% plus of systems out there, even if your rig can push 4k60 (and you’re talking high end there), you’d be better off dropping to 1080p to get more frames…
Depends on the game of course, and some games play OK at lower frame rates… but imho the drop in frame rate you see going from 1080p to 4k just simply isn’t worth it imho.
My monitor is a 43" Samsung TV. The extra detail from 4K would genuinely make a difference on such a big screen, but actually being able to play games is a lot better. Haha
Instead of getting both a TV and a monitor, I decided to just consolidate them. Tried shopping for a cool Chinese/Taiwanese monitor that would be a deal, but it was impossible to learn about the input latency on them and it’s a pretty safe assumption that part of their cheaper price would come from worse components that result in things like latency. Still, a ~$600 USD TV that’s large enough to enjoy movies on and not unreasonable (in my opinion and experience) to use with a computer was a better choice than getting a TV and a monitor and needing to set up and find space for both.
I agree that we’re in a weird middle ground in terms of performance, but it makes sense when you think about the gap between resolutions (just in terms of pixel density) growing almost exponentially. It’s only awkward because we’re getting so good at making displays.