Well anyway, I hope you enjoy Mint despite the rough start. The second partition has proven useful when I tried a different distribution a couple of times. I didn’t lose my local notebooks or ssh keys that I use for development. I’ve repaired my system a couple of times after a hard lock, but if I couldn’t I like knowing I could reinstall to repair it and not lose anything that’s a pain in the butt to deal with.

Hopefully the reinstall worked out better. When I said everything gets installed to home I didn’t mean literally everything. System level stuff gets installed at root. Personal stuff gets installed on home. Like Steam gets installed on root, Steam games get installed on home.

So you do need enough storage on root for all the system level stuff you might want to do. But the vast majority of your space will be taken up by user-level stuff.

It’s worth noting that you can resize partitions without starting over. You can reduce one partition to move the space to unallocated, then assign the unallocated space to the other partition.

The Linux system and applications get installed to root. /home is for user applications, documents, etc. everything that would be account-based on windows.

Depending on the size of your drive I might allocate 50gb or more to root. I have 250gb allocated and 46.65 are used. Everything else can go to /home.

Mine looks like this.

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.

People partition windows systems all the time. It’s not hard.

One bit of advice I will give you because I haven’t seen anyone else offer it: partition your drive and look up how to install your /home to a separate partition from root.

Give the /home partition most of the space because that’s where everything goes. By doing this, you can completely wipe your system drive and reinstall even a different distribution and’s basically lose nothing. Just in case everything really goes to hell and you can’t repair it without a reinstall.

This was quite easy to do with Mint, but I did need to follow directions as you have to deviate from just following defaults for everything.

Also, I know people love to hate on AI here, but ChatGPT has proven invaluable to me in troubleshooting any issues.

It’s not always right, but it’s far more responsive than forums and often does have good advice as long as it’s a simple problem (and as a newbie user, most of their problems will be simple).

Examples of things it has guided me to fix:

• boot drops me into a grub prompt instead of starting the OS
• I enter my password on the lock screen and it thinks for a moment and then drops me back at the password prompt.

Not sure how long it would’ve taken on forums and documentation, or how much worse I’d have screwed up my system, but I fixed both of those in about 30 minutes without a lot of pertinent technical knowledge.

It looks a bit like your graphics output is pushing a resolution or your laptop screen doesn’t support. Are you able to check those settings for that screen?

Barring that, power cycle is the most common time for electronic components to fail. There’s a chance the screen failed at the same time as you did the update.

I don’t have any other ideas, but maybe someone will.