What's the best Linux distro for someone who had been using windows forever?
I've screwed around with Kali and Ubuntu in VMs but for a dual boot what should I really go with? I want to run android studio, unity and visual studio mostly.

What about Mint or Manjaro?

Try Debian or Ubuntu. I personally prefer using Ubuntu for dev.

ElementaryOS worked for this Mac-curious Windows user.

Stick with the more common stuff, like Debian and Ubuntu (and their variants, if you prefer).
And by god, avoid arch (unless you'd rather waste most of your time fixing broken shit instead of getting actual work done)

If u want to really enter to GNU/Linux don't waste your time with VM or dual boot, that's the first mistake, everyone who has dual boot and can't do something for whatever reason, goes back to windows and doesn't even search or try anything.
If that's not a problem then start with Ubuntu or Mint, then, when you feel comfortable, switch to Arch and leave Kali to the very end.

And nice joke... Visual Studio on Linux

@ihatecomputers I‘m a mac user and Elementary felt quite different to me (as in „hell can you do anything on that OS?!“)

@Haxk20 any specific reason why you don’t recommend Ubuntu?

@possum Shit, I haven't even used mac. I think it looked almost as pretty. Never occurred to me that the similarities might stop right about there.

> be me
> see os with dock
> yep, that's a mac

@ihatecomputers Yeah it looks very similar (beautiful UI really), but it feels stripped down in functions, even compared to macOS. I would casually walk into an Apple Store to try one if you’re interested.
Btw if you liked the dock, try Latte dock on Linux.

@possum You know what? I WILL stumble nervously into an Apple store and try it out, thanks for the suggestion 😘

@sgzadrian Oh yes, forgot about the Visual Studio thing :p

Just a heads up. Visual Studio is not cross platform. It's a Windows product only. However, Visual Studio code is cross platform. So there's that but don't expect even close to all the functionality that Visual Studio has. And if you do expect it, also expect that you are going to do A LOT of configuring and adding extensions to get something that does everything you want it to. It is an amazing lightweight text editor though that is extremely customizable, something VS doesn't do very well in terms of UI

I recommend elementary OS and fedora, chuck them in a VM and give it a wirl

My opinions:

Mint is a simple, nice, and clean distro built over the Ubuntu base so you get maximum compatibility (for all its weaknesses Ubuntu is still the most popular, most things will have instructions for it if nothing else). I generally recommend Mint as a starting point for people getting into Linux. Its DE is also friendly for Windows users, in general the whole thing is great at just getting out of your way and letting you do your stuff.

Manjaro if you want a clean and simple no-nonsense arch based distro that's not too heavy on maintenance. It's basically Arch + OOTB stuff, and works great. Been using it for months here, no issues apart from some WiFi squiggles.

I always have trouble getting Fedora to work, elementary OS feels too constrained even by Mac standards, and Arch/Gentoo/etc. are only worth it if you're willing to put in that time.