Hi there!
Seeing the enshittification of Windows unfold, I’m curious about trying out Linux.
I don’t want to move over my main machine just yet, but I’ve got a 9 yo HP Pavilion 15-e001ed spare laptop I want to experiment with. Eventually I want a gaming laptop that can run steam games.
When I googled I found a plethora of pieces of advice, but seeing the proselytizing for Linux here, maybe I could get a bit more personal advice as a potential conscript.
So what advice would you give me to start my journey into Linux?
UPDATE: Ok my cherry is popped, writing this from a fresh Mint install. It’s suprisingly smooth sailing. Only thing is somehow software gets installed on my root partition instead of the home partition I made because people told me so.
But overall not nearly as dounting as I thought it would be. Thanks for the help everybody!
People partition windows systems all the time. It’s not hard.
Yeah, but Windows partitions are pretty easy to understand since you don’t have a bunch of different extra partitions and filesystems that also differ between distros. You typically just make a C partition, pray that its size will be enough for the next years, and then make a second one for all of your data. You don’t have to think about root and boot partitions, which filesystem to chose, which name to give, how and if you should encrypt which partition, etc. etc. It’s all much more streamlined and well documented. On Linux every distro kinda does its own thing, so you can’t even just quickly look shit up. And if you want to encrypt things, suddenly all the guides are invalid anyway. It’s just messy and obtuse.
During Mint setup, it was surprisingly easy. Spent more time researching file systems. One GUI tool. Configured a swap, EFI, /, and /home. Very easy. I don’t know about other distros.