Yeah. I probably should have been more clear about that.

Ah, that makes way more sense.

A live USB would let you play around in a desktop environment for a bit to see if you like it before jumping in the deep end with it. But if you’ve already tried out KDE plasma and know you’ll like it, then you’re probably fine. I agree that you won’t become familiar with a full distro without data persistence and repeated use.

Maybe at least live boot gnome if you haven’t tried that one yet. Gnome and KDE are the most fully featured desktop environments, so they’re natural choices for users coming from win/mac.

Yeah, you can always install another, but if you are going to do that every day or two before settling on one, maybe consider installing virtual box and trying out the distros like that first. Of course, if you’re in a VM, it can be a challenge to get proper hardware acceleration if you’re going to try out gaming.

At the end of the day, I think dual booting is a good idea, as long as you only use windows when it’s your only option. That’s what I do. It’s easy enough to reboot if I need to play a game or use a windows specific app. More consistent than dealing with QEMU or something.

You can indeed always install another distro. You can also run many distros in “live cd” mode, just boot from the install media and choose the live option without installing. It’s actually a great way to see if a distro will play nice with your hardware and LAN and peripherals out of the box.

Oh, my misunderstanding, I thought you wanted to dual boot OpenSuse and KDE Plasma. Dual booting Windows 10 and one of those makes way more sense, especially if you have niche university software that was probably written 20 years ago for Windows XP service pack 2, is already barely compatible with Windows 10, and almost certainly never had a linux version. You definitely don’t want to gamble on abandoning Windows completely until after you graduate.

And yes, once you get comfortable installing a distro, it gets pretty easy to just install a new one.

Can you easily switch drives in your system? I’ll often do that on my computer because little m.2 SSDs are so darn cheap now. It’s easier and cheaper to pick up a little 64GB drive for one off projects than it is to do a proper backup and restore.

Also, I’d just go with Tumbleweed. I don’t distro hop like I used to, but that’s because as everyone else is saying, most of the distros have gotten really good. Most of the time, my little projects are trying out specific features of a different distros. So I’ll just pop a new drive in, test drive it, then either switch back or not.

I don’t understand the issue here. Does that mean I can kill my BIOS bootloader somehow? Or the display driver? And how would screwing up drivers on one SSD with Linux affect my other SSD with Windows? Sorry if these are dumb questions, I’m just trying to get my head around as much of this as I can.

Yeah - the home directory in Linux pre-dates the windows Users directory by a long time. You’ll see the multi-user nature of your OS exposed much more in Linux than you will in Windows.

Every user will have a /home/username directory on Linux (often referenced by “~” or by the environment variable “$HOME”). By default this is the only directory that user will have any permissions to create things (with some exceptions like /tmp which is used for temporary file creation - but nothing long-term). So all of your configuration, user-created files, etc. will be created there.

Configurations are often stored in ‘dot-files’ or in directories that begin with a period. These are “hidden” by default with most file-browsing tools (it’s just a tradition - there’s nothing otherwise special about files or directories that begin with a period). So you’ll have a .bashrc which is the script that runs when you start a bash shell for example. Or .local which is where you will find a lot of application configurations these days.

So if you copy /home/username somewhere you will copy all of your configurations.

Some applications will install there as well. Steam, for example, will install your programs under $HOME/.steam.

Things you install “system-wide” will be installed to /usr/bin or /bin. This will typically be things that you use a package manager to install. So the steam application may be /usr/bin/steam but then all of its configurations, installed apps, etc. go in your home dir.

If you’re curious where a command lives you can use which cmd or type cmd from the command-line and it will show you (something I often wish Windows had).

NOTE: There are exceptions to everything I’ve said above. But those are the “general” guidelines. In short - if you installed it without needing root permissions it’s likely somewhere in $HOME.

Essentially, yeah. Most programs will install to your root directory, but all your personal configs and personal files will be in your home directory.

What I’d personally recommend is using Timeshift to automatically keep backups if your home directory on a separate partition, then if you want to switch distros or if you need to reinstall for whatever reason you can use Timeshift to restore your home directory pretty easily, as long as your new install uses the same file system.

The home directory is like the Windows users directory, yes.
In the shell/terminal it’s represented by ~ or $HOME, it’s path is likely /home/$USER/
First / = Root
$USER = current user account you’re using.

You should check out this Arch Wiki page & this Arch man page.
Don’t worry it’s pretty distro agnostic.

I keep hearing good things about both of those. They’re the first two distros on my list to try out after OpenSUSE.

It’s easy to forget the steps you took to do something on your computer, especially several months later when you’re trying to upgrade. Sometimes when you try several different ways of solving a problem, it’s easy to forget which method was successful the next day!

History with Fish makes this easy

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No worries, it’s a lot of details to take in having never been part of it. The thing about the open source world is that there’s no central authority figure to say “this is what we’re doing, stop doing that other stuff”. So instead, anyone can do anything without consideration for what else is out there.

So yeah, package managers are one way to install software, there are many different package managers out there, and virtually every distro ships with the one that fits their design philosophy best. Package managers tend to point to a set of repositories (servers full of packages) that are managed by your distro maintainers. Depending on the package manager, a “package” may be a pre-built binary, or it might just reference some source code and scripts to build it. Either way, the purpose is to make it easy to install packages that someone has theoretically taken a look at and given a thumbs up to, indicating that it should work on your distro, in combination with the other packages in the repo (theoretically).

But not every single binary out there has been inspected by every distro maintainer. There are often licenses that prevent them from re-hosting proprietary binaries on their servers, and even if the license is permissive, it’s not uncommon for maintainers to disallow packages that aren’t open source. So ex. Discord has a Linux binary you can download and use, but it’s not commonly served from a package manager.

“Wine Is Not an Emulator” because it’s not emulating hardware. At the end of the day, windows and Linux are both running on your x86-64 CPU. In theory you should be able to point the Program Counter at the first instruction in a binary, and the CPU won’t care which OS it’s running on…until it tries to make a system call, or jump to a windows-specific dll. Wine basically tries to create an environment so that when a binary tries to do something that is normally only offered by the windows runtimes, there is code loaded to do what it expects.

These days, I recommend trying out Bottles to run arbitrary windows apps. It’s user-friendly, you create “containers” for specific windows apps, and it uses wine under the hood.

And then you have things like “flatpack” which are kind of like package managers where the package is a bottle/container, but the software it runs could be for any platform (Linux or windows). There are pros and cons to this (pros usually being stability, cons usually relating to the size of the containers on disk).

There are people who are adamantly for/against each thing, which is why distros exist in the first place. That’s just how the open source world works. I recommend finding something that works for you and not feeling obligated to worry about the 10 other ways people have gotten it working.

Good luck!

so is there a difference in downloading something from the internet and installing a ‘Linux’ version of it, or installing that through a package manager?

Installing with a package manager is easier, since it handles stuff for you. You’ll usually only download software from your browser if it’s not available in your distro’s package manager.

Package managers may have multiple repositories, these are like lists of packages, and may differ from distro to distro.

A good analogy is thinking of a package repo (short for repository) as a library, and the package manager a librarian helping you search for a book.

‘use’ wine to run windows programs but what does that mean? Do I run it like a VM? But it’s not an emulator?

It’s a compatibility layer, to put it simply (since I’m not a WINE expert) it converts Windows stuff to Linux stuff, instead of straight up running a Windows VM.

Bitwig and Blender work great on Linux, as well as most games. MS Office and the proprietary apps will need a separate Windows install. Wine is a compatibility layer that essentially translates the Windows files into something that your Linux OS can use. It works great for some things, like games, but isnt recommended/doesn’t work for others, like Office or Adobe suite. Personally I’d recommend finding the alternatives for the programs you need on Windows and trying them out, while keeping the original programs in your Windows install. You can get used to the workflow of the new programs and decide if switching is a viable thing for you. And if not, hey now you’re comfortable with another set of programs just in case you need them in the future.

I found this easier because I messed an earlier installation trying to change desktops. (I don’t remember the distro.)

I’ve been using openSUSE for a while now and haven’t come across any software that was not available for it. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, but I wouldn’t worry about it. It’s a pretty good OS in my opinion.

openSUSE is rather small, not everything is packaged for it. Arch is the best in terms of software availability, thanks to the AUR.

The only distro that even comes close is NixOS, but I really wouldn’t recommend it for beginners. You can explore it in a VM though or maybe at some point actually try it out. It’s very very different than other distros though.

The response you got above is the best advice. Get a second internal drive of any type and size, and install distros on that. You totally can partition your existing windows drive and install linux alongside it, but… you’ll probably screw something up along the way and bork your windows install. Use another drive and it’s much harder to do. If you want to be super safe, you can unplug your windows drive during installs and then it’s literally impossible to break your windows drive.

The other advantage is that nobody knows what distro will be right for you. That means you’ll want to distro hop - and that’s so much easier when you have another drive you can just format and start over with (and not worry about your boot loader).

To your follow up question, yes, linux can read and write to the contents of your windows drive. If you mount that drive, then you can do whatever you want to it, including deleting things that break your windows installation.