Having a hard time deciding between Fedora 24 and Antergos. Please help me decide

[Monkeyspank111]

I wil be installing this on my HP Pavilion 17-e016dx laptop. I put in a SSD and upped the RAM to 16 gigs of DDR3. Link to my laptop specs

 

I'm so sick of Windows 10. I just want a fast Linux based operating system that will give me the least amount of issues. I'm also going to run Windows in a virtual environment. Using VirtualBox but later might switch to a different virtual product. Sadly I'm a college student and need to run Windows so I can use Microsoft Office 365 and other Windows only based programs. 

 

I am not sure which one to pick. Hope someone here can help.

 

 

[IloveLinux]

How much do you know about Linux?   Both of those distros require some work.   You have more then enough ram to run any OS with no issue.  

I have always found Debian based distros easier to deal with.   Which DE do you prefer?   KDE or MATE or Cinnamon or XFCE?   Try several distros out live and see which you like best.   Never been a big fan of Fedora but its well supported.   Google your laptop and Linux.   See what other uses say.

You can have two hard drives in your machine.   Buy a laptop caddy to replace your DVD drive and use a mechanical drive in it for storage.  

 

Set up your hard drive with NTFS and EXT   This way you can have Windows on your drive and not in a VB.  Place  your home folder and Swap on the mechanical drive.     Of the two I'd go with Antergos.   

[Unobscured Vision]

Any distribution you have questions about would best be answered by running a Live Session of that Distro and trying it out before installing it. If it runs without much issue, then it should be okay. Read reviews before installing it too, that's very important -- make sure you pay close attention to similar hardware specs to yours, and any issues other users have had. Generally speaking, the newer the Distro the better it'll be with newer hardware.

Just general common-sense stuff. I'm a Student as well, and WPS Office has replaced everything I needed from Office for School.  I don't even need the OneDrive space. And yes, it's fully compatible with the current Office file formats (.docx, etc). There's always the web-based Office if you still need access to Microsoft Office stuff, and it works on 'nix just fine. Never had a problem.

 

My Distro of choice is Mint, currently on 17.3 -- upgrading to 18.0 when it's out. Maybe hold off and give that one a try, it's based on Ubuntu 16.04 (with updates). So far the testers seem to like it a lot.

 

Hope that helps. Just don't wipe out Windows until you're certain of what you're doing, because it's a rocky path to get things back to normal again.