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!
Make a live disk of linux mint or ubuntu, plug in and play around with the system. If you like it install as dual boot and get going. Have fun!
Relax!
The laptop is probably ok. Try out something fairly easy to install and beginner friendly. I recommend Mint and Ubuntu, they both have a large userbase to ask for help if you run into problems. Good luck!
I have few advice for you:
- for your old laptop you should install Linux Mint. What I have seen is that LM works better for slightly older laptops.
- if you are using linux, you will definitely face problems, and most of the time other people has faced the same problem and there is a solution of it online.
- if you can’t find it online, ask about it in forums. Many will try to help you.
Also, I know people love to hate on AI here, but ChatGPT has proven invaluable to me in troubleshooting any issues.
It’s not always right, but it’s far more responsive than forums and often does have good advice as long as it’s a simple problem (and as a newbie user, most of their problems will be simple).
Examples of things it has guided me to fix:
- boot drops me into a grub prompt instead of starting the OS
- I enter my password on the lock screen and it thinks for a moment and then drops me back at the password prompt.
Not sure how long it would’ve taken on forums and documentation, or how much worse I’d have screwed up my system, but I fixed both of those in about 30 minutes without a lot of pertinent technical knowledge.
I would’ve wished for a rough step list when I migrated, so here you go:
- Download an ISO for a distribution of your choice.
- Flash this ISO to a USB stick. You’ll find tutorials, if you search for “Live USB”.
- Turn off your laptop and get into the BIOS or boot menu. Typically, you will need to press the power button and then repeatedly press one of these keys: Esc, F1, F2, F10, F12
In there, you should be able to select the USB drive to boot from it, or you might need to set it as the first item in the boot priority list. If it doesn’t boot, you might need to enable USB Boot or disable Secure Boot. - When it does boot off the USB stick, you should be presented with the Linux desktop. You can take a look around before committing to the installation. (This live mode is also great, if you ever need to recover something from a hard drive in a laptop which’s OS is broken.)
- Start the installation and go through the wizard. Typically, there’s a shortcut on the desktop to start it.
This is a great overview. Some extra notes:
Linux will be sluggish running “live” off the usb stick. Do poke around but know it will be faster running from the laptop’s SSD.
For a way to install onto a USB stick, check Balena Etcher. I guess there are better tools out there but this worked for me every time I tried it, seems to work on windows too, and I found it intuitive.
Thanks. Most other posts are on which house distrom I know that’s a big choice, but this is some more practical info.
I think I’ll start out with Mint for now, as that’s the most suggested. And someone mentioned it looking like win 7, which actually appeals to me,
https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=413809
Check if this applies to your machine
Yeah, I started on Mint, too, back in 2015. I do think, it’s a good place to start, when you don’t yet know what the different choices.
I especially appreciated that its keyboard shortcuts are very similar to Windows out of the box, so that’s at least some amount of muscle memory you can retain while you’re learning lots of other new things.
Installing on a old laptop is great because eventually after you get a more serious machine, you probably got enough experience to choose your distros.
Linux mint is certainly the most promising option, especially if you are just using the laptop, and don’t have any external monitors setup.