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

[boB Stepp]

On Tue, Jun 28, 2016 at 6:34 PM, David Rock <david at graniteweb.com> wrote:
>
>> On Jun 28, 2016, at 18:16, boB Stepp <robertvstepp at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, Jun 27, 2016 at 10:48 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> 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.
>
> Ultimately, not likely to be all that much.  The bigger constraint with running VMs is often available ram.

Based on everyone's input (Which all was quite helpful!) I'm going to
stick with the original idea of creating a dual-boot environment.
Windows 7 is already installed and up-to-date along with my other
Windows-based software that isn't directly Linux-compatible.  Plus, I
don't play games often, but it will be nice to have W7 available for
that.  And I will not get *any* unnecessary performance hits on any of
the existing software.


> If you value Alan’s opinion (and arguably, your wife’s is more important), try out Mint. You may or may not like it, but you won’t know until you try.  I still say a dry run in a VM to get a feel for it would do wonders for you regardless.

Mint will receive my initial attention.  I prepared a USB flash drive
last night with the Cinnamon Mint 17.3 iso with the intent of trying
out Mint running from the USB thumb drive, but when I got to the
rebooting stage to change my boot priority I got my first surprise:
My Christmas present of a Corsair mechanical gaming keyboard was not
_seen_ during the boot up sequence until *after* Windows started up.
So I could not get into my BIOS area!  I had not noticed this earlier
as I have had no need to tweak my BIOS settings since acquiring this
keyboard.  This inspired some online research where I also found that
this keyboard is not Linux compatible, though some clever people have
created some work-arounds.  So I have ordered today a new mechanical
keyboard that *is* Linux (or anything else) compatible out of the box
with no software installation required plus a new hard drive
(Apparently Hitachi may be making the most reliable hard drives these
days.).  My intent is to keep Windows 7 where it is and install Mint
(If I still like it after playing around with it off the USB drive.)
to the new hard drive.  I now wonder if my Logitech M570 wireless
trackball mouse will work with Linux?  Again, some online work says
that Logitech does not support Linux for this product, but others who
have done a dual-boot setup with Windows installed before Linux seem
to have found that once the mouse is connected with Windows, it will
be seen by Linux.  This remains to be seen!  If it doesn't, I guess I
will have to get a new mouse, too!!

Hopefully I will be playing around with Mint tomorrow some time.

-- 
boB