this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2025
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Linux
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Okay, but have you tried actually installing it? VMs just have worse performance
That may be my only choice. Was trying to avoid it as I don't want to lose everything on my computer and dual booting would be difficult as I don't have a huge hard drive.
You don't need to install it to try it. Many distros will let you try the os while it is booted off of the usb. Ofc this doesn't give you all the functionality and you won't be able to save data. But you will at least see the performance is better.
So, am I the only one with terrible performance when booting from USB? Really long input lag, loading times, all that. I figured it wasn't a big deal for installing once and occasional troubleshooting, but it's not really representative of the normal experience booting from my ssd.
I'm gonna second the reccomendation to just boot it from a flash drive and try it out. Virtualization takes a ton of performance and on lots of hardware isn't going to be a nice experience compared to actually running it without virtualization
You don't have to make the switch, but it'll give you a much better sense of what you might like, without dealing with lag and input delay :)
My recommendation generally (although the current price of memory makes this more difficult) is to buy a second NVMe drive and install Linux on that. No fussing with a second install on one drive, virtually no risk of Windows thrashing your Linux install or accidentally deleting your Windows data while partitioning, etc. And you can just wipe the drive and install something else if you don't like it, or use it as storage if you ultimately don't like Linux.