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!
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
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.
Oh, that’s good to know, I just reinstalled as one partition, seeing as it’s my spare laptop and I figured there aren’t going to be many personal files on there anyway.