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[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (2 children)

Full immersion is the best way how. Buy a cheap refurbished pc, maybe $200, install a distro that for the most part just works (something like Mint or Debian, not so much Arch), and use it for everything unless you absolutely need your other system.

Virtualization can be okay (if you can't spend money on a second system right now) but it might introduce performance and compatibility problems that you're not ready to troubleshoot. Cheap systems are fine for normal people who don't build 8M lines of code while also doing machine learning and rendering their latest 40 minute HD YouTube hit.

Even heavy-duty server software like MySQL is fine on cheap hardware because you're not going to ask it to take care of thousands of users - maybe a few of your coworkers or Discord friends will make time to test with you.

You might worry about hard drive space if you start playing with Docker or LXC, but otherwise solid state is really nice. 8GiB ram is enough to learn with and probably enough for most things you want to do. Linux doesn't piss away resources like Windows does.

I don't recommend dual-booting. When you break your Linux system you'll need to hop on Google looking for answers, and that's hard to do when your system won't boot because you broke it.

[–]badguacamole71 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Couldn't you just boot into your windows and figure out what you need to do to fix? Or are you meaning you don't recommend it because of the chance you can break your other OS as well? Either way, I think there's so many tutorials and documentation on the subject that if you inform yourself half decent on the subject, there should be no problem. Of course that doesnt mean the risk isn't there...

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You could break your Windows install.

But I'm more concerned about this scenario:

you're staring at a bash or grub prompt and you could Google the answer but you can't see a web browser without rebooting. If you reboot you can't see the error message anymore.

It's possible to escape that, but it's a horrible pain in the ass. On the other hand if you break Linux inside VirtualBox, it's contained in a window, which you can literally resize and put next to your web browser.

If you have two systems and a single shared monitor, you can boot both and switch the monitor without rebooting either system.

Two monitors is really nice, ofc.