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!
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.
I did manage to get seperate partitions, allocating 20 gb for the root. Now I’m installing software and it keeps saying the root is full… Does it not automatically install in /home? I can’t find a way to point installers to the home 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.
Thanks, I just went with suggestions. Think I’ll need to reinstall to make a better sized root, unfortunately, but that’s for tomorrow
Oh yeah, suggesting Linux partitioning to a noob… lmao I use Linux for years with many distros and I still don’t understand this part.
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.