so
im not gonna install linux on my new pc right away since ill only have one boot drive at first and i want to use it for Windows Gameing™️ until i get the money to get the other doodads i want
but i do want to dual-boot between win10 and linux eventually. so
i know if i just ask "what distro should i try" ill get a hundred different answers. so instead i will ask: do yall have tips for how to efficiently try out different linuxen so i can find one i like myself?
@typhlosion try them out in VMs first if you're not confident. VirtualBox is quite nice for that if you need a recommendation
Focus not on distribution, but desktop environment. It's where the lions share of the user experience actually comes from.
Find a distribution that comes with many pre-configured desktop environments (EndeavourOS advertises 8), and just install it a few times, picking different desktops during the install process.
— Now, I wanted to comment on dual booting as a whole.
Ultimately the question is:
What is your goal?
If you're trying to leave Windows behind, but you you "need" Windows for some software, and you don't "need" Linux for any software, then booting into Linux will always be little more than an inconvenience.
My advice is to have three drives, Windows, Linux, and a shared storage drive, and never put your Linux and Windows drive inside your PC at the same time.
Shared drive so you'll always have your files. Having both will provide you the safety net and convenience of not needing to re-install and reconfigure your entire PC. While making OS swaps a very conscious choice.
@typhlosion how easy the easiest things are is pretty much determined by your desktop environment, which isn't dependent on your distro, so in my opinion the measure of a linux distro is how hard the hardest things are. my advice for figuring out how you feel about a distro as fast as possible is to not shy away from tasks because they turn out to be harder than expected. if you fall back to windows whenever you have trouble setting stuff up on linux, you can end up being pretty happy for years with a distro you'll later realize you hate. i know that's potentially a big pain in the ass, i'm not saying you gotta do it to be a real linux user or anything, it's just what i think is the best way to accomplish what you asked.
in the more concrete, using a separate partition for /home is the best thing you can do to make switching between distros easier. that way you get to keep all your user-level configuration when you switch.
@typhlosion oh, p.s.: a separate btrfs subvolume also works if you don't want to figure out how much space to allocate to root and how much to allocate to home
@typhlosion i mean, i guess virtual machines? but that's not really a fair representation, at least for me, since you're not really *using* the operating system
your best bet is to just, find one and stick with it. for me i have a separate home partition, so, installing a different distro isn't that much of a challenge