I know I'm running the risk of getting flamed, but I'm a big believer in Dual-Booting, I have my Linux as my daily driver and my minimal Windoze install for all Teh Gamez.
Am I alone in this?
(Zoltan will kill me)
I do, I run both on my PC and on my laptop. On the laptop I have the Linux partition in ext4 where i keep important files, IDE's for software development and anything else I might need on a daily basis(like browsers with the addons i need, word processing programs etc.). And then I have Windows on a separate partition with Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, Crazy Bump and all of my games, that i keep ultra clean and as barebones as possible (a lot of optimisations like disabling services etc. keeping idle ram usage at 400-500mb), and lastly a NTFS data partition for all of the stuff I don't care if anyone sees. Everything on a UEFI only environment.
I have a minimal Windows install (33 GB), it's strictly for gaming until I can play more than 20 games (out of 100+) in my library on Linux, or I can get Wine/Play On Linux to play nice.
No multimedia or Internetz on the Windows install bar Steam and updates as Fedora is my daily driver
I use to a number of years ago but I used windows 99% of the time, so after I reinstalled into an SSD I didn't end up keeping the ubuntu install. Might decide to install linux mint to play around with one of these days though. I wonder if they have a linux version of the superior web browser Opera....
i dual boot on one of my laptops. Linux (currently elementary OS) and Windows XP.
i don't use dual boot; (i did long time ago) but now vsphere vcenter.
I did try running Windows within a VM for School & Teh Gamez, which was fine up to the point where only one of my graphics cards would be recognized and I like all the pretties when gaming, Wine was very temperamental (Damn you Y U Not play Skyrim) and that was a deal breaker, so I resorted to the dual boot option, plus it would also keep to a minimum the amount of proprietary drivers on my Linux install.
Tip for people dual booting: use OpenSuSE, it's specifically made to be more comfortable when dual booting with Windows (like for instance it uses the same BIOS clock interpretation and stuff like that). OpenSuSE is also a very easy-to-use and full-featured distro, maintained by some of the best linux people out there, and can easily be set up for rolling release (Tumbleweed) or bleeding edge (Factory). OpenSuSE also gives easy free access to a lot of very nice SuSE (Novell) cloud services, and it looks pretty good with the green Geecko theming (making it one of the nicest KDE implementations in my opinion).
Dual booting should always be second choice though, honestly, if you can virtualize (if you have the hardware to do it), you should do it.
Windows is like an evil MAME. It's just a software console that enables walled garden entertainment software like games and Adobe apps and other virtual Lego toys, but it's also the biggest malware cyberdomination operation ever. It was never made for the Internet, nor for modern hardware and large modern storage solutions and things like that, and it's just not safe or efficient to use for computing, communicating and getting work done.
I understand that not everyone can virtualize with hardware passthrough. So sometimes it's necessary to downgrade your hardware with a bare metal MS-Windows software console install to satisfy a craving for commercial entertainment. Just think about what you're using it for. Would you use an XBox for confidential documents or communications? Would you use a Playstation to access your bank account? If the answer is yes, go ahead and use Windows for it also, but if the answer is no, be consequent about it, even if you have to reboot...
There is one big reason why I also ran with Fedora, it was the only distro that instantly recognised my third monitor, and I also wanted to keep my install as clean as humanly possible without reverting to proprietary drivers (Catalyst, Flash etc etc).
My Fedora install is my main beast where I do all my grunt work, the Windows install has thus installed, Steam, Catalyst, MSE and Chrome, I'm even perusing a lot of guides to see how much farther I can shrink it down (WMP, IE and the like).
I did try to use Linux exclusively, but when the Gaming bug bit I lost over half my games compared to a Windows install, Virtualization also didn't quite cut the mustard for me personally and I didn't want to bloat my Linux with proprietary non-free software I wanted to keep it as close to FOSS as possible lest I incur the wrath of the Lord Stallman
Quick Update, Booted into Windows and both Fedora and Windows clocks are synced, which is a good start as my previous dual-boots messed around with the Windows clock.
Disabled Hibernation, Windows Media Features and shrunk Paging File Size and shrunk System Restore to 1% of HDD space, which netted a total of 10 GB reclaimed space, so my total Windows install is now sitting at 20 GB
Been wanting to dual boot for a while, anybody got a good suggestion of a distro for a first time user?
Zoltans suggestion of OpenSUSE is a good one, it plays nice with Windows as M$ throw moneys at it, pretty much works straight out of the box.
I've had no dramas so far with Fedora and it's easy to get into as well, my biggest gripe with previous attempts is that Linux and Windows use different clocks so you boot in and out and the Windows clock would go crazy, this explains it a little better than I can:
http://lifehacker.com/5742148/fix-windows-clock-issues-when-dual-booting-with-os-x
Mint, Manjaro and of course Ubuntu pre 12.10 are all pretty straightforward to use
Thank you for the suggestions, Will definitely check them all out eventually.
One of the best things about Linux is once you have a live CD/USB you don't have to install you can have a play around see what you like about the particular distro and then decide which to install
Fedora, OpenSuSE, Mageia and ROSA are very similar. That's why you don't get the clock thingy.
I have been a Fedora fan for years until last summer, because they have always delivered a very stable super bleeding edge experience and a new version every 6 months, and the slickest Gnome experience out there (since Gnome has also become a RedHat project pretty much).
The problem I have with Fedora is not with Fedora but with RedHat. RedHat has decided that Fedora should be less independent, less community based, and more specifically just a RHEL test bed. In order to achieve that, they've slowed down the community development, and the release cycle. RedHat has basically prohibited the RedHat devs to work on Fedora on company time. This has suddenly turned the distro that had the most talented manpower developing and maintaining it, into one of the distros with the least manpower developing and maintaining it. Another thing that happened with Gnome, is that it's not spyware free any more in the Fedora/RHEL versions. RedHat has also shut down valuable community tools that made the Fedora experience a whole lot easier. I understand that RedHat wants to sell RHEL licenses, and that Fedora being such a great product was basically internal competition, but what RedHat has done to Fedora was very counterproductive (Mageia, ROSA and SuSE gained from it, not RHEL) because it goes against the whole idea of open source development.
This has left a gap in linux distros, in that there suddenly was no more professional grade desktop distro that was super stable and optimized, had all the latest kernel features implemented throughout the entire repo packages portfolio, and had all the latest development and security tools available.
Six months down the line, this gap has been filled by both Mageia and OpenSuSE, whereby Mageia Cauldron is very similar to what Fedora once was to most fedora users, as most Fedora users would really take testing seriously, and would run a Fedora Testing distro with select Rawhide packages. However, Mageia is not quite as quick in terms of adapting the different application packages to the latest kernel features, because a whole lot less people work on it than there used to work people at RedHat on Fedora. Mageia Cauldron is also not as stable as Fedora Testing was.
That's where OpenSuSE stepped in, and boosted the OpenSuSE Factory project. OpenSuSE is a pretty conservative distro with a slow release cycle, focused on stability and compatibility, especially focused on compatibility of OpenSuSE machines in an environment that also has MS-Windows clients. OpenSuSE is thereby a pretty "bloated" distro in linux terms, but it's still pretty fast, and it's much more modern than Debian Stable, whilst getting the same reliability and stability statistics. OpenSuSE Factory on the other hand is momentarily the most bleeding edge distro, lately often surpassing Fedora Rawhide. It's also bloody stable for such bleeding edge code. Arch for instance is nowhere near as stable, and is a couple of weeks behind on Factory. OpenSuSE Factory is also very meticulous in security patch distribution, they're as fast or faster than Debian in that respect, and they of course use a lot more security technology, whereas Debian is still years behind and just doesn't offer many security technologies that have proven themselves in the last years, not even in their Sid repos.
The OpenSuSE project also gets quite a lot of money from Microsoft. This is because Microsoft sells SuSE licenses with a 50% price premium in comparison to the price that Novell asks for the same licenses, and Microsoft is just a passive revendor, they have no added value, all the license services are performed by Novell's SuSE network. But notwithstanding that, Microsoft has become the biggest linux seller in the world by far. The SuSE licenses sales has been hugely successful for Microsoft. Because of the deal between Novell and Microsoft, Microsoft pays a percentage of the profit they make on the sales of SuSE licenses to OpenSuSE, the community development branch of the SuSE distro. I think this year alone, the counter surpassed the half-a-billion dollar mark in linux sales by Microsoft, which means that there is a very substantial budget for OpenSuSE development.
A driving force behind the OpenSuSE Factory project, is one of the main linux kernel developers and board members of the linux foundation, Greg Kroah-Hartman, a very talented linux developer that has acquired just about the same iconic fame as Linux Torvalds himself, and definitely is as well regarded in the open source hall of fame as the likes of Richard Stallmann or Andrew Tanenbaum, etc...
There is nothing wrong with Fedora, it's still a great distro, that spearheads a lot of innovation. It's just not as accessible any more for everyone, because in order to follow up with the latest technology, Fedora Rawhide users now often have to debug themselves and build and rebuild until certain things work. That's all fine and dandy in itself, that's the time invested in the benefit of mankind, but there is the problem: in order for the findings of individuals that invest time into testing and debugging to benefit mankind, the information has to be shared. The debug information used to benefit the community, and the RedHat people would make sure that the debug information was examined and that patches were implemented in the Fedora repos as soon as possible. The RedHat people could do this in a very efficient way. The individual non-developer users just can't do the same, for two reasons: 1. the packaging requirements of RPM distros are very stringent and take a lot of time, packaging for RPM-distros is not as simple as DEB-packaging for instance, it's much more time consuming and requires a lot more administration and precision, and 2. because the RedHat developers can't work on Fedora on company time any more, the feedback mechanism between the user community and the maintainers has de facto been cut or at least severally bottlenecked.
I still think that Fedora is the nicest Gnome distro out there next to Sabayon, just like Mageia and OpenSuSE are the nicest KDE distros out there. There is a quality to RPM distros that is very noticeable when you use those distros in a production environment. They save a lot of time and are functionally superior. I have a really hard time using other-than-RPM distros for work, and whether I'm using SuSE (which is what I use now as standard distro in my company after having used RHEL for years and having done a tryout with Mageia) or OpenSuSE Factory, or a mix of OpenSuSE Tumbleweed and Factory (which is what I use now on my private machines as main distro, together with Manjaro and Gentoo), or Fedora (which is what I use to keep in touch with Gnome), or Mageia (which is like the relaxed and more minimal version of OpenSuSE), I always get a really efficient and trouble-free experience, whatever I throw at my machines.
I hope Fedora really doesn't fuck up Fedora 21 release, which is upcoming. When fc20 was released in the stable branch, fc21 was announced as the first HSA distro ever. I'm not quite sure they'll make that claim happen, because a lot of things in the industry have not quite worked out the way they were planned (Intel slowing down development and reprogramming all it's release cycles, Intel having huge troubles getting their GP-GPU parts to work, AMD making deals with Microsoft and Sony about locking certain technologies out of the open source AMD branches, which probably didn't happen in the end anyway, but slowed down the development of HSA protocols, linux kernel 4.x probably not going to happen anyway in 2014 as expected a year ago, etc, etc...). But whatever happens, I hope that fc21 will once again show true innovation as expected from Fedora.
A lot of great information, I am having trouble getting the Live KDE or the DVD to work, normally I would mount the iso to a virtual drive then transfer the files to a usb flash drive, however when I go to my boot options. With either installation method I get the message "there is no operating system installed on this drive" (something along the lines of that).
I tried the boot options in both UEFI and Legacy and still no avail. I followed the instructions of some youtube videos and I always get the error message after attempting to boot the install or KDE. Any Suggestions?
I did not burn the ISO to a DVD, I used unetbootin and selected the one iso or the other and let the program do its work. I will try to burn the iso in a bit, although I will need to go out and get a usb dvd drive later as my computer does not have an optical disk drive but my families desktop does.
i have an Acer C720 chromebook, and i just put linux on it. both ChromeOS and Ubuntu(i put on xfce) work simultaneously. i just press shift+ctrl+alt+forward and i am in linux. back, and i am in chromeOS in an instant. it is nifty.
How many boots are to many? I've run out of primary partitions on all 4 (fully operation) computers due to the variations of operating systems I run.