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Beginner Distro recommendations
(startrek.website)
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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.
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.
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.