I'm thinking about giving Linux another shot after my first attempt didn't go so well. A few months ago, I built a new PC with the following specs: Intel Core Ultra 265k, MSI Z890 Tomahawk Wifi motherboard, 32GB Kingston HyperX Fury DDR5 RAM, a Crucial P310 4TB M.2 Gen 4 SSD, and an Asus Noctua GeForce RTX 4080. Recently, I also swapped cases and changed to a be quiet! AIO cooler, and I plan to upgrade to an AMD 9070XT GPU shortly after my car insurance renewal in February.
Initially, I aimed to run Linux without Windows, but I ended up frustrated because only Arch-based distros worked well for me—specifically Manjaro and CachyOS. I had issues with Fedora, Ubuntu, and Debian distros, mainly because the kernel version wasn't compatible with my motherboard's ethernet, though WiFi worked fine. Eventually, I gave up and returned to Windows.
Now that there have been updates, and given my annoyance with Microsoft, I'm contemplating a dual-boot setup. I have a couple of questions:
1. Should I invest in a second SSD or go for a partition on my existing drive, despite the risk of data corruption?
2. Is it possible to set up the drives or partitions so they don't communicate with each other at all? I want to ensure that when I'm using Linux, it doesn't access Windows and vice versa. Thank you for reading my late-night musings!
2 Answers
Have you tried Linux Mint? I've been testing various distros for a couple of months, and Mint has been the one where everything worked perfectly right out of the box for me. I use an RTX 3060, and after switching to the proprietary GPU drivers, gaming was a breeze!
If you're looking for a stable and up-to-date experience, I suggest checking out Fedora 43 Workstation or its KDE Plasma spin. It's been working great for me on my Asus ROG Strix! You might also want to try Omarchy; it has some cool features.
Thanks for the tip! I’ll give Mint a shot first.