New to Linux, I have Fedora 22, thinking of switching to openSUSE 13.2 or run them side by side

Hello,

I’m new to Linux, as I was involved in a legal dispute with Microsoft, I switched to Linux, earlier I had Kali installed on my HDD but for some reason it got corrupted and wasn’t booting, so I used Kali live for a while, then I downloaded and installed Fedora 22, I’m having problems with it, the 2nd login screen is stuttering and becomes unresponsive every few moments, as I thought this was a graphics driver issue, I tried to install my graphics cards drivers, but when I ran the “*.run” file the system became slow and came to a standstill, so I did a hard reset. I find Fedora 22 interface a little counter intuitive, I’m getting used to it though, I was initially shocked with not finding “minimizing” button on windows and lack of task bar at bottom, which made switching between the file I read and the file I write notes in, tiresome, I had to download and install Gnome tweak tool through terminal to enable them, doing it through terminal wasn’t easy, mainly because of unfamiliarity of commands, etc.

Now I’m thinking of trying openSUSE 13.2, but it’s download size is around 4.7 GB and I’m on a limited package, I’ve already used up around 2.5 GB downloading Fedora 22 and elementaryOS, my experience so far with them hasn’t been good, for this reason I’m hesitant of downloading openSUSE 13.2, before I download it I want to know, do the windows in openSUSU 13.2 have “minimizing” button and does it have a task bar? Is switching between windows easy? Does openSUSE 13.2 provide the option to make the default color of the windows dark? Does it have a firewall builtin or do I need to install one? How much space does it occupy, will it automatically configure necessary partitions itself and give the option to choose their sizes? I have a programming itch and I want to master C completely, are there IDEs available for this? Is the driver installation straightforward?

When I installed Fedora 22, it installed a boot loader, which shows a list OSes available on my PC, including the non-functional Kali, if I want to remove Fedora 22, is there a way to remove Kali, Fedora 22 and boot loader to free up the space? I don’t want to lose the ability to get into my Windows partition, will openSUSU 13.2 install it’s own boot loader and provide the list of OSes available? How to remove unused OSes from HDD and boot loader list?

Please answer. Thanks

legal dispute with MS…Ouch :open_mouth:

ok one of the live version is easier on the bandwidth and you can install from there the biggest difference is that it only has one major desktop on it where as the full dvd has both gnome and KDE. Note that you can install either later if you want and a more convenient usage window.

Details on how to dual boot depends on the hardware. Mostly if EFI BIOS or legacy BIOS and how you want/it is set up. It also helps to know what graphics card.

Again detail of how to remove a OS depends on EFI or legacy BIOS and how those OS’s were installed

maybe show us some detail. From Red Hat show us

fdisk -l

please use code tags (#) on the editor menu bar to preserve the computer output format

In Linux you can have many different desktop environments, each one with its own behaviour. All the things you mention are available if you choose KDE as your DE. I can’t talk about others because I don’t use them. Incidentally, if you’re moving from Windows then KDE is likely one of your best choices. I find it very close out of the box, both in appearance and behaviour, to Windows (except the single mouse click as default for actions, but that’s the first thing I change)

OpenSUSE comes with a built in firewall by default. I can’t comment much on it because since I’m already behind a firewall, the second thing I do after installing OpenSUSE is disabling it.

Just checking my freshly installed OpenSUSE with lots of additional packages (PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Kdenlive, admin tools, krita, ffmpeg and lots of codecs and I don’t remember what else) in addition to the defaults. All of it takes a bit less than 9GB, however my advice would be to allocate at least a 20GB partition to it.

Yes, it will, but I’d advise to review carefully the proposal given to you by the installer before telling it to go ahead. I installed a fresh one yesterday and it was trying to setup itself on the spare space in my pen drive!!! “Expert partitioning” is your friend here, there you can check (very carefully) which partitions are going to be formatted if you want to keep your Windows/other OSs alive. If in doubt, don’t proceed with the install until you’re pretty sure what is going to do and where.

If anything, there are too many IDEs. You have many choices in this regard.

If the HW is on the compatibility list, your driver is already built into the distribution and you won’t have to install anything separately. If not, driver installation varies from driver to driver, from easy (installing a package) to difficult (compiling from source)

As part of the installation process you have the option to go into “expert mode” when partitioning your disks. At that point you can delete or add new partitions. You should not remove the boot loader yourself and instead let the installer do it. It will recognize existing installed OSs and will give you at boot time a list of choices to select from.

You won’t lose the ability to get into your Windows partition, however, after setting up OpenSUSE Windows will likely refuse to boot. I don’t remember the exact procedure because I did it a lot of time ago, but I had to boot with a Windows install disk and ask it to “recover” or “repair” an existing Windows installation. Once the Windows install found its own installation it did whatever it needed to boot from it again.