My personal preference is KDE for its flexibility and powerful configuration options (you can assign individual window rules even).

Current Debian testing is using KDE Plasma 5. If you use Mint LMDE it should be using the same, but regular Mint might be using KDE 4, I'm not that familiar with their release cycle.

You can read more about Plasma 5 here: https://kver.wordpress.com/2015/01/22/plasma-5-2-the-quintissential-breakdown/

As a new user I think you'll appreciate Cinnamon the most. It'll feel the most familiar to you while you're learning your way around.

Personally I like both Cinnamon and MATE.

+1 this.

I currently use Cinnamon on my Linux media server box while I run MATE in a VM. Both are an incredibly easy transition from Windows, UI-wise.

So I just had a mini freak out ;)

I was playing around a bit with a distro off of a DVD. I decide "What the heck, why not partition off a bit of my disc and install there so I can stop running an OS through a DVD drive." Partition manager shows my "hidden" 14 gb Recovery Drive and my mounted ~900 gb sole "boot" drive which currently houses Win 7 and well, everything on this desktop. I decide to "go big" and choose to leave my current Win boot with ~500 gb. From there I hope to end up with a ~400 gb section. I'll then partition this down and leave a small Linux OS partition and the rest will give me a new chunk of space from which I can start to copy the files I want to back up from my existing Win 7 section.

So it all sounds well and good, I "Unmount" my boot section and click resize / move... and get an error. After the error it shows that I have 0 tb in my boot and I have a bit of a mini panic attack thinking I've managed to wipe my computer. A quick reboot and I'm fine (duh!) but it was enough of a scare to come here and ask someone to walk me through a partition. ;)

I'd like to do it (if possible) FROM Linux, running from my DVD drive. I'd like to (obviously) do it TO my sole existing boot section. So, little help before I wipe my computer ;)

One little throwaway tip for anyone that doesn't like reading documentation, but uses Wine via the command line, and doesn't want installs messing with one another, then at least check out the WINEPREFIX environment variable.

Eg. WINEPREFIX="<install directory>" wine ...

Try it in a virtual machine first, https://www.virtualbox.org is free :) Make a Win7 VM then boot into the live environment in the VM (after making a backup of the virtual HDD so if you break it you can easily & quickly restore it) so you can play around with the partition manager there without risking anything.

I finally made a partition for Linux and I can't figure out how to actually install it there. I watched a few videos and all of them (installing Mint) had an option to "Install Alongside Win 7" - I don't get this option. Is it because I'm not connected to the internet during install?

Otherwise - can anyone walk me through the manual settings I'd need to get it set up on said partition? I'm a bit nervous to attempt it myself (when I select "Manual" install it's just a little daunting - I wouldn't care so much if I weren't trying to keep my Win 7 intact LOL).

Will that VM let me "fake" install Linux as well? I'm not sure I want to go that route just yet but if I can't figure out how to point it to my partition (and what else I'd need to create as well) I might try it.

I strongly recommend you to avoid all this mess. If you really want to dualboot, get a second hard drive and install each OS on the separate physical drive (which you can partition independently for each OS as you want already). It's the cleanest way to do it and also more flexible, since you can swap them between computers without tying one OS to the other.

If your motherboard has UEFI firmware, you can make UEFI partitions on each of those disks, and then select what to boot at startup time. For older hardware, BIOS allows selecting what drive to boot from as well, but you'll have to use MBR in that case on each of those disks. This way one OS doesn't even need to know about existence of the other.

Alternatively, you can have one boot manager (either GRUB or Windows one) which will be loaded from one of the disks, and provide booting selection in there for both.

Guess this means you successfully resized your Win partition. If not, say hello to your data for me, will ya? Seriously, always backup important data, especially before changing logical disk structure.

As I suppose you now know, resizing as well as other partition-related tasks can be done from the installer itself, but you could also use Gparted, program located on your live DVD, before commencing installation. There are other ways also, but these two are the most convenient for new users.

No, it has nothing to do with you being connected. adamhm explained the reason of it missing, in the previous post.

The advice you got about a separate drive is surely the most foolproof method, but installing it on an existing one shouldn't pose a problem either.

Since you did manage to create dedicated partition for Linux (ext4 filesystem perhaps?), make sure you also reserve a portion for Swap partition, usually the size of RAM for newer systems with 4 GB+. Not mandatory but highly recommended. When the installation wizard takes you to "Installation type" screen, select "Something else" and then manually assign partition you chose for Linux by selecting it and then "Change", where in the "Use as" box you choose desired filesystem (ext4 for example) and for "Mount point" you select "/". The same you do with newly created swap partition, but you will only have to choose "Use as: swap area". You should be good to proceed, but if unsure, write for further assistance. Good luck!

This is the approach I would have taken if my computer had had enough resources for it when I started out. Running in a VM does 2 things for you. 1 it allows you to quickly switch back and forth as needed, so if there are things you can't yet do in Windows you're not losing a lot of time. And secondly, it means that you don't have to worry about breaking the install. Restoring is easy and if you set the disk to be immutable, it doesn't even retain the mistakes you've made.

Otherwise, you could just do a normal install, but sometimes Windows doesn't play well with non-MS bootloaders and if you want to reinstall, it's a lot more work.

I hope nobody will mind me giving my $0.02
I don't think you really need to be telling him all this. I'm pretty sure the installer will do this stuff by default. In my experience installing lubuntu (this is another distro you could try, nice and fast) you don't manually have to do any partitioning, in fact I have never heard of the swap partition, though granted, I'm not very familiar with how operating systems are installed and work. You just select the dual boot install option, figure out how much hard drive space you want to allocate to each OS and away you go.

If he needs the extra room I guess, but otherwise I don't see the point in an extra hard drive, I don't think it will really make things easier. Right now the easiest thing is probably to use some partition manager, like partition magic, and put everything back to just one Windows partition, and then let the installer make and format a different one.

One other thing, if you do end up installing a linux distro and then for some reason want to remove it, do not just delete the parition allocated to it. When you dual boot, linux installs software called GRUB, which enables you to choose which OS to boot at startup. Deleting the linux partition will mess it up and probably end up being a real head-ache.

It was helpful, as I also wanted to set a separate /home partition as well. I was feeling a bit more confident last night and I'm going to dive in later.

For my home partition, I'm guessing I can just create another volume and mount it /home? Also, should I set all my new partitions (/home and /) as logical drives? I admit to not being entirely sure what the difference is, but I think there's a "Check Box" for two options - one logical and one perhaps primary?

Should my / OS install be primary? Or is my original Win 7 Partition the sole primary (assuming of course that the proper second checkbox was called primary LOL - it might have been something else).

I'd say it makes things safer and easier. One OS messing up the drive (or you by mistake doing it ) is less likely to affect the other. Plus as I said, having both OSes on one is inflexible. If you have them on separate drives, you can easily take them out and swap between computers. If they are on one - they are tied together.

Not at all.

Not in the case of manual partitioning, which is what Ixamyakxim wanted:
Right.

You can go with logical drives.

If your Win 7 partition is already primary, leave it as that, and all the other you create set as logical drives.