Dual boot pros/cons? Is it necessary for me? Learn programming

[aaronbleop]

First off, I'd like to apologize if I've posted this in the wrong category; I figured it would either be programming or operating systems and that the latter was more appropriate. Anyways, I would like to start learning how to program, and was just wondering if dual booting a form of Linux with windows 10 is something I should be considering? I'm a computer engineering student (atm, I've also been thinking about software), so I routinely use CAD programs, Maple, etc. Do I need to work with a Linux based platform in order to learn programming? Is Dual booting the best route? What are virtualmachines? Essentially, I'm looking for a beginners guide to getting started with experimenting with Linux, if I need to and how I should go about it if I do. I wouldn't be using my main rig, I would dual boot my new laptop (Lenovo y700 i5 model). I'd love to hear anybody's' thoughts on what I should do

[mikat]

I personally use OSX for programming and I think it's better for programming than windows, since you have the terminal and i use that alot, windows recently added support for bash but idk how good that works..

I'd go with dualbooting, since linux dual boot is pretty easy (in the installer it asks if you want to install it and keep windows (dual booting))

[fireclawx]

Whee. I just wrote a reply to someone else who was interested in learning linux. You can find it here

Read the whole thread too, it's pretty interesting.

 

[aaronbleop]

16 hours ago, fireclawx said:

Whee. I just wrote a reply to someone else who was interested in learning linux. You can find it here

Read the whole thread too, it's pretty interesting.

 

So what exactly is a virtualbox or virtual machine? Is it different than dual booting? I'm pretty sold on Arch right now, so i'm just confused as to how i should go about putting it on my laptop. Should i install it on my SSD with my Windows 10? or the HDD storage? Should i use a virtualmachine? It's hard to know where to start and ask questions about this process when I don't know the seemingly major things it involves. 

[fireclawx]

On 9/16/2016 at 11:36 AM, aaronbleop said:

So what exactly is a virtualbox or virtual machine? Is it different than dual booting? I'm pretty sold on Arch right now, so i'm just confused as to how i should go about putting it on my laptop. Should i install it on my SSD with my Windows 10? or the HDD storage? Should i use a virtualmachine? It's hard to know where to start and ask questions about this process when I don't know the seemingly major things it involves. 

Haha no worries my man. Everyone starts somewhere

So a Virtual Machine (VM for short) is when an application (in this case Virtual Box) emulates another operating system within your existing OS. It does not install anything on your actual hardware.

 

If you dual boot, you're actually installing the operating system on your hardware and has it's own boot partition on your laptop. If your laptop has an SSD and an HDD, you'll need to choose where you want to install it (I'd recommend the HDD if your SSD is small and you want to keep that for windows only). What you'd need to do is create a partition for arch (again, this is all explained in the video) and then install arch on that partition.

 

To be perfectly honest, if you don't know anything about partitions, and VM's, then you should probably hold off on an actual install and do a bit more reading first

It's always best to be safe rather than sorry, especially if you only have 1 computer that you need to use for everything and it's your main/only machine. You really don't want to mess anything up, so the more research you do the better!