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!
I was in your situ a few months ago. I put some distros on USB sticks, decided which one was more to my liking (Ubuntu) and then went for the full install a week into it. There were unexpected unpleasant surprises, namely i had to repartition my ssd drive (and reinstall Ubuntu), and i ran into some issues with read/write permissions for USB sticks. Try distros and install on your old laptop like you said. Test drive it to your satisfaction