I don't understand why all of you are suggesting such an archaic distribution as Arch. Sure it's great for hobbyists that have time to fuck around with it, but for a production box (IE, something reliable for school) Arch is not a good idea due to it being bleeding edge. It's an incredibly volatile system. I'd honestly recommend BunsenOS (formerly Crunchbang). It's built on Debian, which is a sturdy distribution, and it comes with a pre configured Openbox environment which is much less resource intensive than any DE. Also, don't screw around with Ubuntu or the many derivatives of it. I'd go into a long winded rant on that steaming pile but maybe for another day.
They only act differently if you choose not to use a Casper partition, which is what retains data after a reboot. However, this is still really unreliable and a dangerous thing to use for this scenario.Good point but
-Partition editing isn't too risky, shrink the windows one and make a Linux one, simple.
-Live USBs perform slightly differently to a proper install depending on the USB.
Last edited by Joom,