Yo, so first of all, congrats on being able to ditch Windows! Second of all, I got hype-convinced to make the switch a few days ago and I have LOVED it. Moving from Windows to Mint (at least so far) was a breeze. There’s a tiny bit more thought overhead that goes into fixing things sometimes, but if I’m really honest about that, I had a lot of that with Windows, too, I just have decades of fixing Windows experience.

The Algorithm™

Not joking, there is a not insignificant portion of the population spurred to click videos based on thumbnails like these.

I actually just spent the better part of this afternoon doing just that! I messed around with Mint and it basically ran perfectly fine. Literally no issues at all (besides some of me not understanding how things worked). All my critical stuff works perfectly well, with the sole exception being a game I run where mods are pretty heavily windows-based. I did find a decent Linux community around that, though, and they seem to be running things pretty well, too.

I know I shouldn’t dual boot with a partition, but that’s what I’m gonna do to see if I can make it a couple weeks without anything major going wrong. I tried the live boot disk, but at the moment all I have is an external HDD and it makes some things insanely slow, so partitioning is the move for now. I’ll drop Windows in a couple weeks, though.

Edit: I’ll probably also try out some other distros once I’ve got Mint set up as well, just to be sure I’m not missing out on something else that will work. For now, I just want easy to use and easy to learn.

I appreciate the advice! All my looking around so far has me thinking Mint or Bazzite, but I think Mint will end up being what I go with so I actually learn how to troubleshoot in case I need to move to something else in the future.

I’ll look for a free drive and try and test this afternoon!

I would if I could handle significant downtime on my computer. I absolutely cannot have my only device not working for some elements of my life at the moment, so I’m hesitant to just swap and hope. Someone else recommended testing live distros, though, so I may try that for a couple weeks just to see if anything goes wrong.

I unfortunately don’t have the money for a second SSD at the moment. I considered partitioning my drive, but I only have 500GB and it feels like that would be a pretty big issue if I don’t figure things out quickly enough.

A live distro? I’m not actually sure what that is. I’ll do a bit of looking around about it, though!

I’ve heard that as well, but at this point I can’t really risk something going wrong and not working at the moment. I am tempted to give it a shot, but I need to at least make sure I have a fallback if something goes wrong.

I actually super appreciate these videos. I’m absolutely convinced at this point that, regardless of compatibility issues, my next system will be Linux, but I have absolutely bounced off of it the last couple times I tried. Being able to see different people’s initial experiences with different distros feels pretty invaluable to me at this point.

At the moment, I only have a laptop and can’t afford either a new system or for my current system to go down, though, so I’ve been hesitant about making any actual changes. That said, my laptop’s about six years old at this point and starting to really struggle, so I know it’s coming in the next year or so.

EDIT: I found an external HDD to work with! I’m setting it up with Cinnamon now and I’ll spend the next couple weeks trying to treat it like my main driver to see if I can handle any quirks that comes with it.