I’m considering installing Linux on my laptop but I’m unsure if I should start with a virtual machine first. My main use cases are gaming and coding, so I want to make sure it’s the right fit.
What are the pros and cons of using Linux for someone like me? Would starting with VirtualBox be a good idea before going all in?
Dual booting is problematic, as mentioned you’re messing with your partitions and could mess up your windows partition, but also windows can, unprompted, mess up your Linux bootloader. As long as you’re careful with partitions and know how to fix your bootloader from a live image, there’s no real issue, but it’s worth keeping in mind.
By the way, I recommend rEFInd for the bootloader when dual booting, it doesn’t require configuration and will detect bootable systems automatically.
A VM sounds like a good idea to try a few things out, but do keep in mind performance can suffer, and you might especially run into issues with things like GPU virtualization. If you want to properly verify if things work and work well enough, you’ll want to test them from a live system.
As a final note, you can give your VM access to your SSD/HDD - if you set that up properly, you can install and boot your Linux install inside a VM, and later switch to booting it natively. You still have the risk of messing up your partitions in that case, but it can be nice so you can look things up on your host system while setting up Linux in a VM.