Only beacuse there are a couple of softawares that I need that don’t run well in Bottles (Nitro Pro and an old app for anothere thing). It’s a laptop with CPU i7 and a NVIDIA graphic card 1050 ti. Which distro would be best suited for the task? Is Mint ok? Thank you.
How familiar are you with Linux? If you’re new to it, pick something mainstream with lots of support and advice out there. I usually recommend Mint as a starter distro - it’s well supported, easy to use and doesn’t have the downsides of a distro like Ubuntu.
If you’re familiar with Linux then I’d recommend a point release distro and not a rolling release distro. Rolling release are cutting edge but that means much more opportunity for things to go wrong which isn’t a good thing to deal with if you’re new to Linux.
Beyond that, most distros dual boot well with Windows (although Windows is not well-designed and can occasionally break the bootloaders as others have said).
I’m on OpenSuSE and recommend it; it’s well designed with good tools in the form.of YaST. I’m personally not a fan of Fedora but I know a lot of people swear by it as a distro. Of the big distros I’d basically only really avoid Ubuntu because of how Snap is forced down people’s throats. I’m also personally not a fan of immutable distros due to the reliance on Flatpak and other downsides but your milage may vary.
Regardless, dual boot with Linux and Windows is a good solution. It’s how I got into Linux; my main PC still has a Win 10 partition which I don’t use but keep as a backup. My laptop and a living room.Media PC are pure Linux.
I’d say Win 11 in a VM is an alternative route for those few apps but I find windows is a bit laggy even on a decent PC. It’s perfectly usable - I’ve run Office and even windows at dual 4k without major issue, but there is a noticeable albeit small input lag and slowness in rendering the desktop that I found just annoying enough to put me off (even at 1080p single screen to be clear).
From reading it seems Win 11 does work fine if you pass through a discrete graphics card for it to use but that’s only doable if you have 2 GPUS. You might have that option if your laptop has a discrete graphics card as well as an integrated one. For me it reflects how bloated and poorly optimised windows is, but there are people who report getting Win 11 to work with high end games without issue although it takes some work. Meanwhile I can get Linux VMs on a Linux host to run at near native performance with ease.
There are free alternatives to Nitro Pro but if it’s an essential for you I’d try dual booting initially while.you test but don’t have to solely rely on VMs initially. If VMs do the job then wiping Windows will free up a lot of space and also stop it interfering in your Laptop set up.