I just bought a new computer with a 1TB SSD drive. Since I honestly don't think I'm likely to run out of space on a 500 GB partition anytime soon, I was considering setting this thing up to dual boot. It's been ages since I've done much with any kind of *nix system so I was wondering if anybody had any recommendations for what Linux distro I should install or if anyone thinks I'd be better off with something like freebsd?
Of course, I'm going to have to figure out how to partition the blasted drive...
Can’t say much about Linux distributions. However, I can not recommend G-Parted enough. It’s always worked very well for me.
I've been very satisfied with the XFCE desktop environment for Manjaro, this past year. I was a bit wary about the idea of a rolling release distro, but it's much more polite about doing the updates than basically anything I can think of, and the extra week or so of testing in the Arch community before things get added to Manjaro seems to be keeping the "broken by the update" blues away while still doing a decent job of keeping things, you know, up to date, without needing a major reinstall operation every six months like staying current with Ubuntu in whichever of it's many and varied flavors.
I will note that I built my machine with a second SSD specifically to use as a 'doze boot drive, because 'doze does not play well with others and I wanted the default boot up to be Linux, no mashing whatever key to get a bootloader. It's still amusing to me that Manjaro can boot from being switched off five times faster than Losedoze 10 can go from selecting its drive in the boot loader, though. Literally. I timed it.
If you like Arch but want it easy to install and maintain, EndeavourOS is my recommendation.
One Linux distro I keep around on external bootable media( DVD and thumb drives) is Zorin it originally billed itself as a "Work alike" for Windows 7. I've used it more than a few times when I needed to start a computer without running the internal system OS.
You can still download a couple of lighter versions and try it, they have changed directions slightly in the last few years, but the "Lite" version would probably be a good version to try.
Almost forget here's the website.
https://zorinos.com/
hmelton