Sometimes you find something that makes you think ‘maybe there’s a point to this whole internet thing after all’

Hey stranger. I always advise a dual boot setup to start with. Use windows as your daily driver and boot into Linux to learn.

Take your time. Don’t worry about terminal stuff right away. Explore (and maybe break) things. Just don’t have anything important there at first.

Backup twice and often. Timeshift is good. Borg (Vorta) is great.

I wouldn’t start with mint. Probably an unpopular opinion. Debian is the way. It runs an older kernel and doesn’t get a ton of updates, and fairly forgiving. Great distro to start learning terminal with.

Test out desktop environments. Find one you love. Then make it home. Start messing with terminal stuff. Learn the basics. Watch YouTube a lot. Learn Linux TV is an excellent channel. Learn rsync + cron. 🐐

Then backup twice.

Start using Wine and/or Bottles to run windows apps. Learn about appimages, flatpaks, deb files, etc. Permissions is a massive must learn. FOSS is life.

Backup twice and often.

I highly recommend an atomic desktop. Fedora Kinoite is brilliant and you have to really try to break it. Plus you get KDE Plasma! But any atomic distro will do.

Backup everything twice and often.

Slowly wean yourself off windows. When you think you’re ready for the jump, don’t do it and give yourself another week. Then learn about qemu/kvm or any other virtual machine package you like. Get a windows iso file and create a windows VM. Install apps in the VM. This is where windows lives now.

When you think it’s time, backup twice, format your hard drive, install distro of choice, install apps, windows VM, and backup twice. Now you have the best of both worlds without windows having access to anything, and you’re a full fledged Linux user!

Or dont. I dont care.

It is if you have a groovy linux admin wizard guiding you

I thought it was fun for the first 10minutes when I wasn’t trying to get back to parity with my Windows install lmao. Wore off real fast. Nothing that 3 weeks of crawling the internet and typing in literal gibberish into the terminal can’t fix.

Except for the stuff I haven’t fixed, and band-aided into working. But it’s minor stuff lol.