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!
Just throw some of the popular distros on your USB stick. Most of them have live bootable environments to play around in for a first glimpse. Figure out what desktop environment you like most and go from there as a starting point for an installation. Since it’s a system you don’t really need you can just freely experiment without being afraid to break things. Worst case is that you have to re-install, or swap to another distro. Fair warning though, some of those laptop components can be very exotic and may not have drivers, specifically things like network, Bluetooth or sometimes even audio chips. Highly depends on the laptop but be aware that there may be some things not running as smoothly as you may want.