There are some setups that allow you to do this.

• nixOS or nix + home-manager on some other distro, but it's a high skill-floor way to manage a computer so wouldn't recommend

• window manager heavy setup where you just set it up then copy over the config files to the new install, a bit of a pain to first customize but viable if you're willing to ditch mouse-heavy desktop experience in favor for keyboard and shortcut focus to control everything.

Apart from those two cases, not really.

I have to imagine there are more than a few substitutes on Linux, it's not dealing with all the Windows DRM bullshit. And it's where all the nerds hang out, and nerds like their piracy.

Arrr.

If you go with NixOS or guix, both of which are declaratively configured, you can swap 99.9% seamlessly. I run the same NixOS config on 2 machine and a VM. Only thing I had to modify between them are some driver specific settings, but those are easy to isolate.

NixOS and Guix are both very beginner-unfriendly. If you're not very comfortable with Linux and its command line, I'd recommend against using them for personal systems.

You can go ntfs -> qcow and put your windows in a vm. It sucks more to go ext3 -> qcow and put your Linux vm on a metal.

Just dual boot. It’s easy and it works and you have a little computer in your pocket to look shit up on if you’re scared about fucking anything up.

Before you dual boot: turn off fast startup in windows, turn off uhh bitlocker(?) and make sure your bios will let you.

Make a backup first, because you don’t have one now and if anything happens you’ll lose everything. Nothing will happen, nothing ever happens, but knowing you’re not fucked makes you feel more confident.

Correct, but I believe the user is looking for a cracked version, as they don't have a license. The likelihood of that existing is significantly lower on Linux than it is for Windows given the much smaller userbase, the fragmentation into multiple package formats, and the overall distaste of proprietary software in the Linux community.

Here’s a post explaining how dual booting works.

When you turn on your computer, the bios or bios equavalent goes down its list of devices to try and boot from. It might have usb or cd first and ssd next, so if you put a cd or usb it’ll boot that automatically.

Devices that can be booted have special instructions in the first part of their storage that can be used to operate the hardware.

When the bios finds a device that can be booted it hands the hardware off to that device and breathes a sigh of relief, most of its work is over. That devices work is just beginning though.

If it finds a windows disk, that disks bootloader will load a minimal set of hardware drivers necessary to load the rest of windows and it builds itself up towards having a functional running windows operating system and presents a login screen to the user.

If it finds a Linux disk, the disks bootloader will do the same thing but instead of loading a set of drivers, kernel and configuration that let it start a windows system it will build towards having a running Linux system. Duh.

When you dual boot, the device the bios finds to boot from doesn’t do either of those things, it runs a bootloader that presents you the user with a choice between the two, then hands the task off to one or the other based on your choice.

Setting up dual booting means clearing off space and shrinking the windows partition so you can have a Linux partition, installing Linux to it and then installing a bootloader that gives you the option to use either os.

Great explanation, is using an external ssd instead of a partition still considered dualbooting?

Yeah, itd be fine as long as the simulation part works, I've heard blender gets 30% better performance and its what I use for 50% of my process and is part of why i want to switch. I had forgotten about wine.

Yes, but the bios will still need to go to the device with the bootloader on it for you to make the choice.

In the case that the external is unplugged or had a damaged wire or something, it won’t work.

Depending on your circumstances you may be better served by just installing Linux on the external device, not writing grub (the bootloader that lets you choose) to your internal drive and instead just booting from it like a usb.

I don’t generally recommend that to people, but if you absolutely will not use partitions no matter what then it’s a less complex way of accomplishing some tasks.

+1 for both comments above.

Back up your current disk! If you do it properly you can always restore your current operating system if this experiment doesn't pan out.

Fedora KDE is an excellent starter choice. The DE will feel relatively familiar coming from Windows and Fedora is very much a batteries included distro. Red Hat guides are excellent and very useful in that family.

this is a good solution

I've switched to using it as my daily driver, and depending on what applications you use, the water is either fine, or is full of piranhas.

Using VR, for example, is still a massive pain in the ass, and requires me to boot into windows when the tenuous stack of software driving it on linux decides to stop working because it's a full moon out.

Touch anything the wrong way, and you're digging through random config or build files to fix it.

off topic, but I saw you mentioned vr on other post so wondering wether you considered setting up vr mocap? For casual hobbyist like me stuff like glycon3d in enticing though I don't know what type of mocap you're after.

Havent put my headset on in over a year now that I think about it, ill check out glycon 3d, I want a user mocpa library version of mixamo, I feel like enough ppl have suits and do this as a hobby that theyd be down to upload some free ones at least. The only platforms that exist don't let ppl sell/list their own in an easy/consistent way.

I just don't enjoy the animation part that much, I like combining existing mocaps and then adding vfx, where I spend 75% of my time.

Thats fair. TBH mocap data cleanup is also a hassle and I haven't decided to delve deeper into that.
CMU has mocap data with permissive license you may find it interesting if you haven't already.

VR nevee worked for me the way it should like on Windows.

It did work many times and was playable. But soft stuttering was there. People literally gaslighted me on the internet that there is no stuttering while there obviously is

Stuttering is present in SteamVR due to lack of async reprojection.
Thats why I'm using Envision which is an interface for a stack of a bunch of different open source VR stuff.

It's quite a bit more finicky and fragile, but it at least has reprojection.

Is there an easy Guide? Would love to play around with it on Arch Linux with Wayland KDE