I usually use QEMU for Android, so I don't have any tutorials I could recommend, at most having their docs at hand.

Also no Android tutorial either as I go by muscle memory on Android due setup changing between Android distros, their versions, and versions of QEMU, and me using Android offline so always the same installer.

But as apparently QEMU is one of the better VM tools around, there should be plenty of tutorials too. If you go for major distros, with their hardware compatibility being more or less the same afaik, QEMU setup tutorials should be overarching too.

And if the tutorials you find don't fully or properly cover your chosen distro, since you seem to be willing to tinker, you could do like I did with Android and pick some random tutorial as a start point and figure out what changes from there.

What GNU/Linux applications do you want to use? If you want desktop free software such as Firefox, LibreOffice, LMMS, Inkscape or Kdenlive, you can install many of them directly on Windows, it will run faster than a virtual machine. If you want to learn the command line, such as bash, curl, vim, imagemagick and ffmpeg, or program in C or C++ using the GNU toolchain, try WSL, from which you can access your Windows files under /mnt/c, /mnt/d etc. A standalone virtual machine makes sense when you want to play with a desktop environment such as KDE or GNOME, or a tiny compositor such as Sway, or a rare desktop app that isn't cross-platform. But it's more pleasant to run them on hardware directly, having installed Debian or Fedora on a USB SSD.

Two reasons : firstly, a pendrive is an expensive item for me.

Secondly, l need to learn to create sandboxes and virtual machines whenever l need to !!

It absolutely can, but I don’t know if it’s the easiest way to try it out.

You might find creating a playable Linux USB and booting from that helpful, as you can try out Linux without the overhead of a VM.

Thank you for your candid reply. But I would love to tinker with QEMU even before l download Linux.

Is there any tutorial ?

You can, but I'd suggest instead, at least at first, VirtualBox. Tinkering with QEMU can be a steep learning curve, so VirtualBox being more UI-oriented could make things simpler.

Counterpoint: Choice is good. Let's not try to impose some Single Standard™ on everything, thanks.

Just like programs not written in Rust are okay, good, and important to exist.

Just like non-systemd init systems are good.

And having multiple options for DEs.

Choice is why a lot of us are even here.

-- Frost

I mean, they're not THAT complicated. Don't be dissuaded from learning if you wanna learn! But more complicated than a spreadsheet for sure... at least for basic stuff. Advanced stuff, maybe not so much, just different.

Been using endeavours over a year now, and love it

I remember when I installed 24.04 it asked about the mount point, so it might be around that same time. I’ll have to pay closer attention this time.

Should be an option during the reinstall, around the time it asks about file systems and whatnot, but I haven't touched Ubuntu in about 15 years, so I have no idea what their install software is like. It's a fairly standard thing though, so I'd honestly be amazed if it wasn't included.

I’ve heard this suggested before. Do you happen to know how to do that during the install process?

No luck. Notably, the button they say this should enable is already present, it just doesn't do anything.

Then I'd suggest Debian. But of course, you do you.

Edit: EndeavourOS is another solid choice if you want to try out the Arch family of distros. It may seem counterintuitive for long term usage, but in practice, it can be very stable. I've been using the same installation for more than 5 years now. You get all the latest stuff, and upgrades are done regularly, so there's no issue of major version upgrades like Debian or Ubuntu.

I test drove a few others before I settled on Ubuntu, e.g. Fedora, Zorin. I settled on Ubuntu for the benefits of the LTS versions. Ideally once I set up 26.04 I’d rather not have to worry about it for 10 years, or until I build a new rig.

I have Timeshift set up on my current install, so I’ll probably go with that again. Good advice!

Set up some kind of system restore/snapshotting solution.

If your OS breaks, you can just roll back to an earlier state.

Others will have to chime in, I'm on an atomic distro that does it easily and by design, but every time people were arguing about wheter atomic distros suck or not, the counterargument was always "but rollback is super easy nowadays", I just don't remember the software used for it.

Just to expand on this - it's because if you reinstall your OS again, you can just delete the / partition, and keep the /home partition with all your user non-os data. It has config files, and most of the data you're working with on your PC, sans actuall applications.

Once you install a new OS, if I understand it correctly (never actually done that) you can just use the same partition as /home without having to copy anything anywhere, you just select it during install, and it will use it with all the data.

I second this. Depending on what you do on your PC, there's probably a better distro with way better default setup, for example gaming distros like Bazzite, that has most of gaming-related stuff already built in. (Note, Bazzite is an atomic distro, which has a lot of caveats, it was just an example since I use it, it might not be the best for your workflow/what you want from the system.)

If you tell us what is your goal (i.e learn more about setting up linux, have a perfectly fine tuned os, or just have an out-of-the-box experience) and what you want to use your PC for (gaming, developemnt, cybersecurity...), we can point you to a direction.

Its been a while since I tried this but I'm pretty sure this fixed it for me:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/SDDM#Enable_virtual_keyboard

I've also noticed issues with the login screen, it's using the belgian keyboard layout instead of my configured one (which works fine when logged in). There's a couple things not matching between system and user settings.

I'd just say that you should try out other distros. Even for newbies, Ubuntu is not the best choice nowadays due to shady practices of Canonical. Maybe something like Debian, or Fedora would be a better choice for you, depending on whether you prefer stability or newer features.

I'm a big fan of occasionally starting over just because I can, and distro hopping.

Personally I run Kubuntu on my daily driver, but I'm experimenting with kde linux (the people behind kde plasma made their own immutable Linux distro instead of hitching it on Ubuntu) on an old laptop and I'm loving it so far.It's very experimental though, so frequent big downloads for updates and things that might not work as expected, though apart from my laptop being configured in BIOS to do RAID for the single disk it has (???) and kde linux breaking specifically for RAID I haven't run into any issues.

I definitely recommend backups of all things you consider important, if possible the whole disk perhaps, just for ease.

Then if you have a big enough disk I would recommend partitioning it into:

• linux installation (~50 gb)
• (swap probably, though not relevant here, however amount of gb you need for that)
• data (the rest, here you save files, documents, photos, videos, steam games, etc etc)

This way, assuming your data partition isn't entirely filled, when the next distrohop comes around you can just shrink the data partition for a new linux partition, install linux on that one, and you can dual boot for however long you need to verify that the new one works.

Then what I do is symlink my home folder and keep it on the data partition. The benefit is that it doesn't get wiped if you wipe the linux installation partition. The downside is that some programs (notably anything in snap's sandbox) have issues with this, due to what I think is either intentional and I missed a config somewhere, or a bug in apparmor. It doesn't hinder me a lot so I haven't looked into it enough to fix it yet.

Separating your / and /home into different partitions could help for future distro hopping.

Especially if you are on a laptop and work on it, I'd definitely encrypt the drive during install.

I've encrypted my partitions on my PC too to be extra preventative of attacks coming from other operating systems i dual boot that run more random software (and are potentially more risky but probably not and I'm maybe paranoid idk, just sounded like I was being smort).