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!
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.
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.
Yeah it was worth getting a bit of experience with that. If I decide to migrate my main workhorse over it’ll come in handy, as it has two drives, and I’ll need to manage partitions on that.
I’ll be trying out some distos over the next year and see what works for my setup. Running into things to solve seems part of the learning curve. So tough starts are kind of how you learn imho.