Ubuntu or Windows?

Why not dual boot, seems like the ideal solution

@SirWeeb ehh why not ill have a go at it

Linux the best for these uses, but i don't think that ubuntu is the one. How about arch or manjaro?

Depends, Windows and Ubuntu are made for the normal user that only uses the navigator for watch youtube, or you know what im talking about, i recommend go for another distro like Manjaro, Debian or Arch Linux

Before a mod writes a 10 page essay on why Ubuntu is better

Windows - For exploiting and whatnot

Ubuntu - Lighter OS, good for some gaming on limited games and web browsing (Combatibility on Linux is trash, you have to get third party apps which are always very confusing and sometimes don't even work.)

Use Linux if anything in my opinion. Not Ubuntu.

@boyke yes yes

it's probably not a bad idea sticking to windows

i myself personally find it stupid to fully move to anything other than windows for compatability issues, this varies from person to person per according to their needs 

@SirWeeb well if he has legacy boot sure but not with uefi 

@Moon you meant ubuntu - full of amazon spyware?

As moon said: "Before a mod writes a 10 page essay on why Ubuntu is better"

I myself prefer the open nature of Linux more than the closed compatibility of Windows. If you want the familiar operating system, sticking with Windows is fine, but I don't see the point. The general misconceptions of Linux include program incompatibility and the need to learn the command line to do any literaly anything. Both of these are flawed as strides have been made in program compatibility (Even wallpaper engine now somewhat works.) and the command line can be substituted for graphical options like ubuntu software center or pamac on Arch.

Roblox for example now runs on Linux with wine 6.11. This has been shown by Texas and I plus a thread was made on it:

https://wearedevs.net/forum/t/21305. Steam has a wide variety of games that are officially supported in Linux, (Pretty much every Valve game, for example, is compatible with Linux natively.) and other games that are not natively supported can be ran with Proton. Proton is Valves own fork of wine, capable of running a surprising amount of games: https://www.protondb.com/

If you want development options, many IDE's such as Visual Studio Code are fully working. I don't prefer this however as there are privacy reasons to avoid the closed source version. Luckily someone made an open-source libre fork called VSCodium: https://vscodium.com/. I don't personally program aside from editing the occasional python script so I don't have much insight into Linux development.

As for hacking and general security auditing software, Windows cannot compete with Linux in the sheer amount of toolkits, scripts, precision tools, etc that are offered. Some tools such as Metasploit, BeEF, Nmap, etc are compatible with Windows but are finicky and require extra configuration. Other tools such as Cain and Abel are windows exclusive but have alternatives that are supported in the modern-day. This goes without mentioning the dedicated penetration testing operating systems like Kali Linux and Parrot Security. These operating systems are tailor-made for security auditing and general hacking, even if the internet's perception of them is script kiddie in nature.

As for the Linux distro I'd recommend, I've hopped between a few such as Manjaro, Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, and Artix but am currently using Arch as my daily driver on my 2nd pc.

P.S. Duel booting Windows comes with its own problems such as windows updates overwriting Linux's bootloader, making Linux unable to boot. Most of my troubleshooting experience with Linux comes from windows somehow messing with my Linux install in some way. To mitigate this on my 2nd pc, I'm running Linux and Windows on dedicated SSD's to prevent Windows from writing to partitions it isn't supposed to.

I'm sure some other mod (Texas) will talk more in-depth about this.

Edit: A good note I should make is stable Linux distros vs rolling releases. A good example would be Debian Linux vs Arch Linux.

Stable releases have a lifecycle and are released on a set basis, Debian's release cycle is roughly every 2 years. Stable releases are beneficial in that they are generally 100% compatible. No package in its repository should break the system and packages are vetted and tested before being released to the main repo. A downside of this process is the slow updates that occur. One such example is JRE and JDK, which were locked to java 11 unless a more up-to-date repo was added. This changed to JRE and JDK 17 in Debian 11s release.

Rolling Releases on the other hand do not have a large vetting process, allowing updates to be pushed when the developer wants them to be. This can be after a good deal of testing has occurred or as soon as someone makes a commit to the repo. Arch Linux's Arch User Repository (AUR) is an example of this. Some packages in the repo have not been maintained in years while others were updated today. This creates incompatibilities, however, as the arch user repository has hundreds of thousands of packages for anything under the sun, and allows users to submit packages every day. Arch Linux does not have a set version number as Debian does. Arch ISO's are usually followed by a date instead of a version number and are released whenever the developers feel like.

Difficult to answer this question because of its broad nature. If you are focusing on Windows-targeted development and exploiting, there are reasons against switching to Linux-based OSes:

1) C# (And subsequently .NET) do not have Linux support, it is a Windows-only development framework developed by Microsoft. If you do UI work with it, either switch over to a different framework or stick to Windows and Visual Studio.

2) Roblox, although fully playable on Linux, does not have native support. Exploiting is possible and exploit creation is also possible, but due to Wine and the previous point, development may be impacted negatively.

If platform-specific development needs aren't a thing in your field, then Linux is obviously a better option. Moon stated that Linux "lacks compatibility" and that you have to use "third party apps", which is bias, lies and lack of experience somehow compressed into one sentence (I'm impressed). Linux offers great support for cross-platform development, tinkering, learning hacking and gaming. If you're planning to study IT or system administration, Linux skills are a must.

@allennova ill take note of this, thx u mate :)

@Texas thanks mate for the info :)