So I acquired a used NUC for having a Linux box...which distro?

[Holbs]

Only linux I have dabbled with was installing Hass.io (I guess now called Home Assistant) and installing the ISO into a repurposed i3 NUC.
I have acquired yet another NUC. Has Windows 10 Pro, 250GB KingFast (never heard of them) SATA drive, bluetooth, wifi, i5-4590 CPU with 8 GB RAM.
I am not exactly sure what the full purpose of this box will be just yet. But I do know I want to relocate Windows Deepstack AI off the Blue Iris machine and learn various linux based programs that seem interesting (proxmox VM's, pi-hole, networking tools, learning dockers and such).
I guess the standard issue is to run latest greatest Ubuntu LTS. But then, many say to take a look at Mint. Then, others say it all depends on what you want to do (which I do not know just yet).
Would it be best to say...Ubuntu Server LTS bascially covers all bases?
Any reason to keep Windows on this thing in a dual-booting setup?

 

[bp2008]

No reason to dual boot to windows IMO.

I have run Ubuntu Server on a number of machines but I find that if you just leave it in its out-of-box state then the boot partition fills up within a year. I have no idea how one of the most popular distributions can have a problem like that.

 

[Holbs]

No reason to dual boot to windows IMO.

I have run Ubuntu Server on a number of machines but I find that if you just leave it in its out-of-box state then the boot partition fills up within a year. I have no idea how one of the most popular distributions can have a problem like that.

I am just trying not to waste the Windows 10 Pro key Who knows if there is a need for one in the future.
Boot partition fills up within a year? What does that mean? I'll have to research that.

 

[Holbs]

No reason to dual boot to windows IMO.

I have run Ubuntu Server on a number of machines but I find that if you just leave it in its out-of-box state then the boot partition fills up within a year. I have no idea how one of the most popular distributions can have a problem like that.

ok. something to do with retaining old kernels that are not automatically removed in time. I'll keep eye out for this.

 

[Zebra Hosting]

Use Ubuntu LTS server. If you want to use A GUI use Mint. You could keep a small dual boot partition as spare in case you need Some Windows tools but if you have other Windows machine I would make iT a plain Linux system. If you want to separate the system in a few separate installs look at Proxmox. Easy to setup and easy to deploy containers , backup and make snapshots before an upgrade.

 

[Holbs]

Use Ubuntu LTS server. If you want to use A GUI use Mint. You could keep a small dual boot partition as spare in case you need Some Windows tools but if you have other Windows machine I would make iT a plain Linux system. If you want to separate the system in a few separate installs look at Proxmox. Easy to setup and easy to deploy containers , backup and make snapshots before an upgrade.

thanks Zebra. Yep, installing as we speak from USB. I love rush decisions

 

[alastairstevenson]

I find that if you just leave it in its out-of-box state then the boot partition fills up within a year. I have no idea how one of the most popular distributions can have a problem like that.

That must have been a pretty small boot partition.
There is an option in the update manager to automatically remove obsolete kernels and dependencies.

 

[biggen]

My standard go to is Debian for servers. I run Mint on my laptop. If you are new to Linux I’d just install Ubuntu. There are more guides for doing things with Ubuntu than any other distro.

 

[alastairstevenson]

I run Mint on my laptop.

I'm a fan of Mint as well, I like the user interfaces and it's an Ubuntu base, so the best of both worlds.