Partitioning drives and Dual Boot Options

[BBBBonzai]

Hello, I am new to the Forum and I hope I'm doing this right.

I have an Asus K55A Laptop with an i7-3630qm 4 core 2.4 GHz CPU, 8 GB ram, a 240 GB SSD in the hard drive slot and a 1 TB HDD in a caddy in the optical drive. I would like to dual boot Windows 10 and some form of Linux mostly to learn the command line and explore open-source applications. That being said I'd like to ask three main questions.

1. What are the capabilities of this setup? I know most serious gaming is kinda out of the question but what tasks would it be proficient for?

2. I have been trying to research how to partition the drives correctly to maximize loading and running speed for applications on my SSD and how to configure for files to save onto the HDD for storage. I have no clue what is the best way to do this, all I know is disk manager.

3. Any recommendations on a good Linux distro? Ideally something intuitive and new inexperienced user-friendly. And how the heck do I learn to use the terminal efficiently?

Thank you for reading all that and I'd love some guidance as to how to best use this computer.

 

[USAFRet]

With a current 240GB drive, you should leave that as a single partition for Windows. Splitting it WILL cause space problems later.

Instead of a dualboot situation, instead look at a VirtualMachine.
This is an OS running as an application. The current OS is not touched, not do you have to reboot to use the other OS.
You can interact with the host Windows, and a guest (whatever) at the same time.

I use VirtualBox for this.

Oracle VM VirtualBox

www.virtualbox.org

The only limiting factor in your system is the limited 8GB RAM.

This is my system, here running 4x Virtual OS's, as well as the host Windows 10.

Which Linux? LinuxMint is a good place to start.

Home - Linux Mint

Linux Mint is an elegant, easy to use, up to date and comfortable desktop operating system.

linuxmint.com