[Tutor] OT: Recommendations for a Linux distribution to dual-boot with Win7-64 bit

[boB Stepp]

On Mon, Jun 27, 2016 at 10:48 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 27, 2016 at 09:52:50PM -0500, boB Stepp wrote:
>> My eyes are glazing over from hours and hours of Googling on this.  I
>> cannot come to a rational conclusion.  Perhaps someone can help me to
>> do so.  I currently have a 64-bit desktop PC that I built myself.  It
>> is running Win7 Pro 64-bit.  I need to keep this OS as I need to run
>> various chess software which can be quite CPU and RAM hogging.  So an
>> emulation layer like Wine would not be desirable.  I don't want to run
>> Linux in a virtual environment; I'd rather have a dual-boot setup.
>
> What about running Win7 in a virtual machine?

What type of performance hit will I take when running CPU intensive
processes?  I don't yet have any real experiences with running virtual
machines.  If this is acceptable, I am willing to forget the dual-boot
idea and just jump in the deep end with Linux.  The only thing I would
hate is reinstalling Win7 into the virtual environment and the endless
sequence of updating ...

>
> Otherwise, I like:
>
> Linux Mint. Good software repositories, more conservative than Ubuntu,
> not as stick-in-the-mud as Debian. Based on Debian/Ubuntu so the quality
> is good, mostly aimed at non-hard core Linux geeks.

Alan obviously likes this distro.  And my teacher wife at the
beginning of this summer break switched several of her class PCs to
Mint.  Be nice to be writing software for the same environment, so
this might be a positive here.

-- 
boB