Hi,

(This is my first question here and English is not my native language, so bear with me and forgive me if I make any oopsies)

First of all, a disclaimer: I'm not really a Linux newbie (I have used Ubuntu and Mint in the past, I'm using WSL2 on my job (a lot of legacy .net, so Windows is necessary), I have set up a dev environment for Rust and Erlang/Elixir on my Chromebook.) I decided to put it here because I am a complete newbie when it comes to Linux as a daily driver for non-technical users and as a gaming platform.

Some background: We have an older Lenovo ideacentre desktop that my wife and children still use. It runs Windows 10, but it's very very slow. I was thinking about installing a Linux distro on it to make it a litter snappier. Getting my children (10 and 13) to experience Linux is also a nice benefit.

I have looked at Pop_OS and Zorin and tried to make a bootable USB stick. However, belenaEtcher always gives an error. I think this might have to do with the virus scanner on my work laptop (which I can't disable.) Is there another way to make a bootable USB to try this out?

And the classic question: are Pop_OS or Zorin (Education?) good choices for my use case?
Gaming: The children game a lot. But mostly Minecraft or Roblox, not AAA games. Are these supported?
Office: my wife uses Excel and YNAB on that PC. (My eldest child has an Office 365 school account, so Office can't be a real problem, even when LibreOffice sometimes doesn't suffice.
Digital drawing: my 13yo likes to draw with his Wacom tablet. Is there good support for Wacom in these (or other distro's)

The hardware:
CPU: AMD A9-9425 RADEON R5, 5 COMPUTE CORES 2C+3G 3.10 GHz
RAM: 8GB
GPU: Amd Radion R5 Graphics

What do you think? What's the big difference between these 2 distros? Are there any others I should be looking at?

Thanks in Advance.

EDIT: I also forgot to mention this rather important requirement. Since it will be used by my wife and 2 children, it needs to support multiple profiles (which I guess is standard), but I would also like to have parental control on the 2 child profiles.

That's a good computer. I'm using an AMD A6 here with 4 GB of RAM and I only bought it last year. I'm surprised that Windows is slow, but any Linux should be fine.

First, the games. Minecraft has a Linux version and Roblox can be coaxed into running with the Wine compatibility tool: Roblox

The Wacom tablet will work! Wacom

I've never tried Pop_OS, but some reviewers say it's actually slower on their computers than Windows 10. On the whole, I'd avoid the Gnome desktop as too different from Windows (although more like a phone experience) and sometimes slow. Mint (Mate version) is still the most recommended distro for beginners.

I see that a lot of people are complaining that etcher won't work on Windows 10, but there are alternatives:
usb tools
I can't recommend one as I don't have Windows.

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My usual recommendation for a beginner is MX Linux, a mid weight Debian based distro.

https://mxlinux.org/

https://forum.mxlinux.org/

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JeroenR,

For the bootable USB drive use Rufus:
https://rufus.ie/en/

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Thanks all for the responses.

I have looked at the machine this morning and I think the Windows Home Edition has problems with having more than one user logged in at the same time. Could be something else, but I won't bother looking for it unless I get the same problem with the Linux installation.

Thank you for all the info. I'll definitely take another look at Linux Mint. (I lost interest somewhere in 2016, IIRC, when the site got hacked and they had a compromised ISO for download)

I've never heard from this distro. Thanks for the info, and for the additional analysis paralysis.

I'm going to try that out, asap. Thanks!

Not to be 'yet another suggestion' but I'm happy with Ubuntu (Mint and Pop_OS are both downstream of this, and have both slight lags from upstream + smaller repos - I doubt you will notice much significant difference between them though (the one potential 'big upside' for Pop_OS is I think Pop_OS includes some additional drivers out of the box for System76's systems with programmable keyboards and switchable graphics, but it doesn't sound like that applies to your situation)), and believe it includes the Wacom drivers OOB - specific application support is another question (I don't know what application you'd use either on Windows or Linux here). See here: https://askubuntu.com/questions/2842...port-in-ubuntu

If you don't like GNOME (I honestly will disagree with the 'you need a beginner distro' where 'beginner distro' must = 'Windows Vista/7/10-clone UI' - I have no issues with Xfce, Mate, etc just I don't accept that 'people' are really so ignorant/unwilling to learn/etc that they cannot learn anything but Microsoft products), there are both official variants with Xfce (Xubuntu), KDE (Kubuntu), LXDE (Lubuntu), and Mate (Ubuntu Mate), or you can just install whatever DE(s) you want on the finished system (they're all in the repo).

Performance should be excellent - I have two APU machines here (one older and one that's probably about the same age as yours there) and they both handle excellently (even with Wayland). For gaming, there's actually quite a lot of options, but it will require a bit of investigation per-game - Wine (and their website) are one good source of this information, but you can also check ProtonDB (www.protondb.com) for Proton compatibility reports (Proton is Valve's build of Wine within Steam), or Lutris (https://lutris.net/) which offers installation wrappers and documentation for games. According to one of the developers' blogs, PortingKit is also likely coming to linux some time in the future (currently it only supports macOS), it is another 'wrapper' like Lutris using wineskin (https://www.paulthetall.com/complete...t-linux-ready/). Finally there's also CrossOver, which is paid software, and comes from Codeweavers (who are a significant Wine contributor), and I think they offer a specific utility to bring Office onto linux (I think it's called 'CrossOver Office' or something of that sort), you can also use 365 'in browser' which (thew few times I've tried it) works well enough.

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In your case, i'd say check out Robolinux
or FerenOS

I would not go anywhere near Robolinux.

Do a search and you will find many critical comments.

Here is one example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmyKiPgC53s

Hi all,

Sorry for the late reply, things have been a bit hectic lately.

Thanks for all the additional responses. I have made a bootable USB (one for mint and one for Zorin, because my eldest son liked the look of Zorin the best) and, even from USB, the computer runs much smoother than with Win 10.

I do have another problem, though. The PC has an SSD (c-drive in windows) that is almost full (say about 15 GB left) and a big old D-drive that has loads of space. Since I have only installed single-user Linux distros and containers in the past, I'm not sure how I should be partitioning the drives.

So, assuming My family wants to dual boot for the foreseeable future: what is the best way to partition these drives where the OS (and swap?) is on the SSD? And how do I mount the drives for different users?

TIA!

That is a real conundrum. Windows is installed on the SSD "C:" and the HDD is "D:"

Installing dual boot is relatively simple as any of the online tutorials can guide you, but you need 2 things. Space, and How it boots.

Space can be made available from what is unused within windows using the windows disk manager, and likely will come from the HDD. That would mean that all your linux would reside on the HDD and not boot from the SSD.

How it boots is critical. Is the system using UEFI booting or legacy boot in windows? If uefi then it is really simple as long as you use the same ESP partition as windows and do not reformat it. If it is legacy boot it is similar, but now the linux boot partition is on the second drive while the windows boot partition is on the first drive. There is a little more to the config there although for the most part the installation software should be able to handle it.

The key to installing properly with "how it boots" is that most installer images are hybrid and can boot either legacy mode or uefi mode. If installing uefi then the usb must be booted in uefi mode. Same for legacy boot. You must install the second OS to boot in the same mode as the existing windows install or you will lose one or the other since they boot differently.

Read the online tutorials and follow along. You should be fine. You have to decide space needed for linux, and all users use the same /home on linux so give them enough space.

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My "distro-hopping" days are well behind me. I settled-down with 'Puppy' Linux some years ago.

I CAN recommend ZorinOS, though. I've been playing around with it for a long time on & off; I keep an up-to-date full install on a USB 3.2 SanDisk Ultra 'Fit' flash drive, because I like what the brothers Zorin (Artyom & Kyril) have done with it, and it's a very smooth performer, well suited for Windows "refugees".

It's all the more impressive when you consider these guys were still in the early years of their secondary education when they first began to develop it....


Mike.

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I had keyboard problems with Zorin OS. Personally, I'm used to using unmarked keys and a QWERTY layout, but my kids need their Dutch-AZERTY layout which Zorin doesn't know.

On the plus side: I have a Linux Mint dual boot system installed and it works great. Now to find a way to manage the time they can spend on it and other parental controls.