Dude honestly I cannot recommend this enough, and to all who are in a similar position:
While you still have your main system as a fallback, get a used cheap laptop with ~8gb ram just to fuck around and try linux, install [your distro] FedoraKDE, and play around.
If a relative or friend is upgrading and gonna trash their current because the HW is choked by windows, ask to buy it for a reasonable price, cheap to you because old trash HW anyway, but a couple bucks to help them with their new purchase, win win. That HW that will no longer run windows will run linux just fine, and then you can main the laptop for a bit while you learn but still can boot into your old system to troubleshoot and also don’t have to fuck with dual booting and windows fucking with your linux or boot partitions.
Dude honestly I cannot recommend this enough, and to all who are in a similar position:
While you still have your main system as a fallback, get a used cheap laptop with ~8gb ram just to fuck around and try linux, install [your distro] FedoraKDE, and play around.
If a relative or friend is upgrading and gonna trash their current because the HW is choked by windows, ask to buy it for a reasonable price, cheap to you because old trash HW anyway, but a couple bucks to help them with their new purchase, win win. That HW that will no longer run windows will run linux just fine, and then you can main the laptop for a bit while you learn but still can boot into your old system to troubleshoot and also don’t have to fuck with dual booting and windows fucking with your linux or boot partitions.
I’ve got a couple busted laptops and some loose memory floating around, I just need to find one of my working hdds.
Technically I have an extra one but it’s acting as my media drive right now and I don’t even have a backup of it…
I definitely want to make the switch BEFORE my current setup dies, since it’ll be easier to transfer/convert everything I can.