> It's getting very tiresome to hear complaints

This is very true. I've been asked by lots of people "how do I start with Linux" and, despite being 99.9% Linux user for everything everyday, my advice was always:

1. Use VirtualBox. Seriously, it won't look cool, but it will 100% work after maybe 5 mins mucking around with installing guest additions. Also snapshots. Also no messing with WiFi drivers or graphics card drivers or such.

2. Get a used beaten down old Thinkpad that people on Reddit confirm to be working with Linux without any drivers. Then play there. If it breaks, reinstall.

3. If the above didn't make you yet disinterested, THEN dual boot.

Also, if you don't care about GUI, then use the best blessing Microsoft ever created - WSL, and look no further.

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opan 14 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I've never gotten along too well with virtualization, but would second the ThinkPad idea, or something similar. Old/cheap machine for tinkering is a good way to ease in, and I think bare metal feels more friendly.

I'd probably recommend against dual booting, but I understand it's controversial. I like to equate it to having two computers, but having to fully power one off to do anything* on the other one. Torrents stop, music collection may be inaccessible depending on how you stored it, familiar programs may not be around anymore. I dual booted for a few years in the past and I found it miserable. People who expected me to reboot to play a game with them didn't seem to understand how big of an ask that really was. Eventually things boiled over and I took the Windows HDD out of that PC entirely. Much more peaceful. (Proton solves that particular issue these days also)

That being said, I've had at least two friends who had a dual boot due to my influence (pushing GNU/Linux) who ended up with some sort of broken Windows install later on and were happy to already have Ubuntu as an emergency backup to keep the machine usable.

*Too old might be a problem these days with major distros not having 32bit ISOs anymore

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charcircuit 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

WSL supports GUI apps now. They open up just like any other GUI app on Windows.

	▲	mystifyingpoi 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I've tried this once for IntelliJ to work around slow WSL access for Git repos. Was greeted by missing fonts and broken scaling on the intro screen. Oops. But probably I was just unlucky, it might work well for most.