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The suggestion to run Linux off a stick is probably the best initial choice. For a few minute's effort, you can test drive live versions of various distros.
There are several 3rd party applications that will burn an OS to a stick -- the last one I used was Balena Etcher: balenaEtcher - Flash OS images to SD cards & USB drives[^]
I dabble with Linux (too much stuff tied to Windows to switch), and running various distros from stick works fine for my needs. For long term, you're probably better served with a dual boot, but for now you play in a risk-free environment.
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Jeremy, does Debian support hibernation? And by extension, Ubuntu & Kubuntu?
The difficult we do right away...
...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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Yuppers. Just took this screenshot of my quick launch control panel. I'm on a laptop though, but it should be the same on a desktop. Fortunately, most distros will have this.
If you're on a laptop too, the real issue is that it's a pain with some distros for laptops when dealing with dual GPUs. Especially if one of those GPUs is an nVidia one. Most recent-ish laptops will have two, one for normal use and battery/lower power mode and one when you need the umph. Some distros aren't quite there yet with making it easy to deal with.
But, distros like Ubuntu will just make that crap work out of the box.
Jeremy Falcon
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Thanks. 
The difficult we do right away...
...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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I'll tell you Jeremy, the main thing that's stopping me right now from installing Linux as a dual boot on one of my machines, is the fact that I don't know how to cleanly remove the GRUB bootloader and restore the Windows one in the event that I want to remove the dual boot.
The difficult we do right away...
...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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Makes total sense man. You got four options at least:
1) You can use a live CD/USB stick. Most distros ship with that. Basically, you can play around with the OS in memory and it installs nothing. Of course, if you mount an NTFS volume and start deleting everything you'll run into trouble.  But, the OS will never install anything, so you can just remove the USB stick and reboot and voila it's gone.
2) Install that bad boy and live on the edge like a wild man. You can use Windows Recovery to repair the boot loader. I haven't used it in a while, but if you're not using drive encryption then it should be straightforward.
3) Chunk that thing in a VM. It might run a tad slower, but ya know... can play around until your heart's content and it's just a VM.
4) Use WSL2. WSL is really nice these days. You can run Linux GUI apps and everything. IMO, it's still nice to take the plunge and just install the whole OS but it's an option.
Jeremy Falcon
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Oh, I should say, I'm sorta in the same boat. My desktop is running Win11 and WSL2/Debian. But my laptop is the one I just went all out on and got rid of Windows. IMO giving up Windows completely now isn't practical, so it's a nice balance.
Jeremy Falcon
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You can boot on an install/recover CD/USB and use BCDEDIT
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufacture/desktop/bcdedit-command-line-options
well it also depends on how the disk was formatted organised (BIOS vs EFI) and such details
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I've mostly used Debian with an XFCE desktop under lightdm. I'm not into customization which is what most of the distros seem to be for - although I'll admit, I've only ever sampled a handful.
Since there are some programs I use which are only available on Windows I have a Windows laptop, so these days I usually run VSCode remote editing with Putty terminals (and the occasional use of XMing) so the desktop is irrelevant.
The question really is "what tools do you want to use and are they available on the distro you like?"
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I think there is a self-contradiction (oxymoron, if you prefer) in your subject line,
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
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People are going to hate me. But here goes.
Ubuntu (latest LTS version)
"It's bloated, it's droolproofed, it's stupid. Dear god why?" I can hear you asking from here.
Userbase size. That sells it for me.
If something goes sideways, like always happens on dev machines, and doubly so with unix dev machines in my experience, I can simply google the problem, because among the zillions of Ubuntu users some poor schlub has both encountered the problem before, and posted about it, along with a solution.
At least this is what I do for paying work, because I can't afford to bill my clients for troubleshooting my machine, so any time I've spent doing that is lost money.
Linux is linux. Unless you actually care that much about which window manager you are using (I don't) pretty much linux is what your installed toolset says it is, from Arch to Ubuntu.
I do run debian on my VPS, but ubuntu wasn't available for that, and probably for good reason.
And I know Jeremy will probably want to shower for the mere fact that I even mentioned him, but he's not wrong.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
modified 23-Aug-24 22:31pm.
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nah, you're the coding witch - feed her small children and gingerbread.
"If something goes sideways, like always happens on dev machines, and doubly so with unix dev machines in my experience, I can simply google the problem, because among the zillions of Ubuntu users some poor schlub has both encountered the problem before, and posted about it, along with a solution."
This is what concerns/intrigues me. I have an answer to Jeremy to post shortly. I grew up on OpenVMS with X Windows and eventually migrated to name your flavor of Unix X Windows. I was in the warm womb of restricted hardware. Enter linux - where it was targeted at PC based hardware, and the level of instability reached holy $hit. I spent days trying to get X Windows (before that other thing to recognize my card/monitor - it was stupid complicated.
Setting aside the graphics, which I will work through, what I need is a common stable platform that behaves
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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charlieg wrote: Setting aside the graphics, which I will work through, what I need is a common stable platform that behaves
This is the key point in this discussion. From that POV, going with any of the major distributions will probably work for you. Codewitch is spot on.
Regarding resources, I expect any modern PC will run the major distros fine. Last year I replaced my 8 yo Lenovo Yoga 15 with a Surface laptop, and in the cleanup of the Yoga I installed Mint. It runs just fine on what was an above-midrange CPU, 9 years ago.
Upstream I mentioned booting from a stick -- use a USB3 port if you have it. I've run sticks in USB 2, 3.0, and 3.1 Gen 2, and the faster the port, the better, at least some of the time.
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If you're not using any graphical IDE's, any distro will do - I use Ubuntu/Debian in a terminal for c/c++ stuff, all my Linux boxes are headless and I ssh into them.
In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity. - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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I develop SDR (software defined radio) software (DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting) in the old TV band III and DRM (Digital Radio Mondiale) on shortwave) since I retired, all on Fedora.
Ubuntu is as fas as I can see the most simple one to install and it has a large user base
The reason I have chosen for Fedora is the great support for cross compilation to Windows.
Ubuntu is used by me for generating AppImages of the packages (AppImages are kind of containers)
Ubuntu is easy to use, however, the releases do not contain the most recent versions of the various
packages.
For both Ubuntu and Fedora I use the default GUI, it is not windows like and that suits me well
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Like Jeremy said, don't go for a rolling release (OpenSuse, Fedora and their derivatives).
Best choice for development is, imho, a distro like Debian or Ubuntu (or their derivatites) which have LTS releases.
Most derivatives are just based upon Debian or Ubuntu (which is Debian-based but with tons of changes/additions) with a different desktop environment.
So that is another choice to make.
I personaly prefer a distro with a Cinnamon desktop, simple and not in the way.
KDE is too graphical for me as is Gnome (this may not be the best term to describe it, maybe visualy intrusive is better).
As stated in an other thread about Linux I use LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition).
A stable Debian release with the Cinnamon desktop.
I leaves out all of the middle man (Ubuntu) stuff which is in the standard Linux Mint and goes straight to the base.
Before LM I used Fedora with Mate as desktop but that was not a very stable environment for me, certain applications (Eclipse comes to mind) didn't like the combo of Fedora with Mate and caused all kinds of UI problems.
I don't care about Wayland or X11 on my development machine as it is not relevant nor do I need a heavy AMD or NVidia graphics, I am not gaming on my development machine.
I use a dedicated computer for that.
To find a distro that is to your likings just download a few live images, make a bootable USB-stick and boot your computer with it and play around.
That's what I did and so I found out that Cinnamon is best for me but maybe not for someone else.
Support in case of trouble is never far away.
You can even most of the time fall back to the base distro (LMDE -> Debian, LM -> Ubuntu -> Debian)
And finally, don't go for a more advanced distro like Arch. It is a very good distro but absolutely not for beginners.
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Pick a distro for support/release. Bleeding edge: Fedora. Staid, conservative: Debian, Arch, etc. Ubuntu (seems influenced by your pals), mint and such are on top of Debian. Many others.
Then pick your desktop, usually easy to set up so that you pick it when logging in. My current set up allows Gnome/Gnome Wayland, Classic Gnome/Classic Gnome Wayland, Mate, XFCE and something else. Choose which ones during install.
Do yourself a favor, try the different distro's and desktops via VM's. I have tried most. I keep coming back to Debian (now on 12.5) and have another boot SSD running LMDE (Mint on Debian instead of Ubuntu) for backup when I break stuff.
Internet Law #1: Whichever one you chose, you were wrong. 
>64
It’s weird being the same age as old people. Live every day like it is your last; one day, it will be.
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I'm happy with PopOS!.
It's based on Ubuntu, with some stuff stripped away, and designed to work well with Nvidia.
I switched from Ubuntu to PopOS! because Ubuntu Snaps pissed me off to no end. Particularly their refusal to allow users to stop automatic updates, which had me jumping through hoops and crippling my Ubuntu installation to achieve.
I vaguely remember I read that they eventually backed from that paternalistic policy but I will still try to avoid Ubuntu in my future endeavors. It just felt way too Microsoft-y to me.
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pushing updates all the time is EXACTLY what I want to avoid. Thank you for the head's up.
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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Yep.
In their mind it's safer to force-push updates of not only OS programs, but also *any* third parties whose software I installed at one point in the past.
I don't automatically trust every new version that comes out, and for many programs I don't even need the security fixes (which often come together with all kinds of regressions, new issues, and sometimes even worse security holes).
As a sophisticated user I want to decide what gets installed on my machine and when. But some people simply lack the ability to think critically beyond the (admittedly often justified for novice users) mantra of "keep everything updated at all times".
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I have a coworker who swears on ArchLinux, but is the OS alluded to in one of the replies below. This is supposed to give what you exactly need, no more and no less, i.e. no crapware/bloatware, etc, but of course steep learning curve and all that jazz.
Personally I use Debian as I am not as daring (and sometimes Ubuntu, as it has some favourable features like command line tab-completions preconfigured) . More important for me is the minimalistic i3 window manager that helps navigation between windows extremely smooth. I am playing with Qubes these days. It helps separate your activities into different Qubes for security (each Qube will have its own border colour). Clipboard transfer between these Qubes can be restricted, so you can relatively securely have your work and personal qubes on the same machine. I like it that i3 customized for Qubes is also there.
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For game dev. Ubuntu because its what large companies test their stuff on.
PopOS if you use Nvidia hands down nothing is more stable IMO. And install Rider, Clion etc with Snap.
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