Long overdue, I know, but looking to start at least partially migrating and working with Dual boot, coming from Windows 10 (putting off 11 as much as possible)…

I have limited Linux experience, mostly in college several years back.

I work remotely with Windows software development, including Winforms, Asp.net, .net core, etc. Not sure what I need to best work with these, particularly Winforms. That may not even be possible, I know.

Looking for any general guidance/recommendations.

Long term, I’m interested in migrating as much as possible, outside of whatever I have to keep up for work… starting with dual boot options then moving towards linux as a primary driver. I have an old media server (also win10, not win11 compatable) not really doing much but running plex when I need it… would love to also eventually poke around with Home Assistant or similar, maybe some LLM tinkering etc.

If this isn’t a good community for this, I apologize, and please point me to a better one if you know of one.

  • _____English
    2·
    1 month ago

    I don’t recommend dual booting. I used to dual boot and use my Linux partition as a work OS and Windows thanos zapped the bootloader more than 3 times. At bare minimum do not partition a drive in order to have two OSs (and one being windows)

    As for winforms in Linux, I don’t recommend it either but you can try out mono. There might be other options. For school I had to use c# and windows because the functionality for development in Linux was lacking. Mono might work, I expect you will encounter various difficulties along the way in terms of set up, environment,etc. That you will likely have to deal with on your own.

    As for the distro, I personally went from 0 experience to using arch and I still use arch to this day 5 years later. I think it’s the simplest distro to use and it’s extremely minimal.

    I know it sounds ridiculous, but I strongly believe the stigma vs arch is unwarranted in this day and age. You can install it with a CLI installer that comes with the ISO and then the rest is like using Linux as usual.

    If I wasn’t a tech person I’d probably use mint though.

    • LordTrychon@startrek.websiteOP
      1·
      1 month ago

      Thanks. I’ve heard of the bootloader issue so I was planning on separate drives for Linux vs windows.

      I love powershell, so I’m not afraid of the CLI, but it is daunting.

      • _____English
        3·
        1 month ago

        The installer CLI involves 0 scripting. You just pick and choose options (and it has defaults) it’s a full fledged installer that runs in a terminal.