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!
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Only thing is somehow software gets installed on my root partition instead of the home partition I made because people told me so.
How are you installing software? If you are using the native package manager (apt in the case of Mint) it will install to the root partition because it’s installing for all users. If you want to install to your home directory, you might be wanting something like flatpak.
I was using the software manager indeed. For steam that seems like the only way to go as it says it needs 32 bit and hence needs root access. (Self reportedly).
I tried downloading the installer from stream itself, but that didn’t fare well.
I’m currently debating doing a re install and just make the one partition for everything, which is a shame ai was proud I managed the separate partitions all by myself. But if this can happen and my root can get filled up with files like this I don’t see how having a separate partition is worth it.
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!
Just throw some of the popular distros on your USB stick. Most of them have live bootable environments to play around in for a first glimpse. Figure out what desktop environment you like most and go from there as a starting point for an installation. Since it’s a system you don’t really need you can just freely experiment without being afraid to break things. Worst case is that you have to re-install, or swap to another distro. Fair warning though, some of those laptop components can be very exotic and may not have drivers, specifically things like network, Bluetooth or sometimes even audio chips. Highly depends on the laptop but be aware that there may be some things not running as smoothly as you may want.
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
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.
Thanks, Mint seems the consensus here, so I’ll roll with that
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.
Part of the challenge in starting with Linux is documentation and support. When things go well, it works beautifully. But what happens when you hit a snag? Where do you turn for help? Search engines will only get you so far. You will need to find other users that had the same issue, and how they resolved it.
You’ll probably end up in forums, both official and unofficial. Check the common ones for your preferred distros, and see which ones feel inviting and helpful. The less common distros probably don’t have the support you’ll need. Certain distros have condescending forums, and may only be helpful with much more technical concerns.
I suggest only mint for beginners
If you separate root and home (look this up, simpler thank you imagine) you’ll have the opportunity to experiment
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
housedistrom 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,
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.https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=413809
Check if this applies to your machineThanks
Since you have a spare laptop that isn’t your main workflow machine, my advice is go for it. Try a few different desktops and DEs. Don’t get attached to any particular one for a little while; use it for a week or so for as many tasks as you can, then switch to another one. Give Mint, Pop!_OS, Fedora, and several others a shot. Just…play with it.
Try Fedora with KDE Plasma on the laptop
Hey there, I made the switch a few months ago and my Linux machine has quickly become my primary laptop! I started out with Fedora, using the KDE desktop environment.
I know folks often recommend Ubuntu or Mint but there are reasons you might decide it’s in your best interest to avoid that. Ubuntu’s package manager (a.k.a. app store) pushes something called Snap packages. There isn’t anything inherently wrong with them, but people tend to avoid them simply because it’s a proprietary package system and the Linux community overall favors more open-source solutions. Also, Mint was an easy recommendation years ago and I’m sure it’s still nice now, but Mint really just looks like Windows 7. It feels aged as hell.
When picking a distro, do understand you’re really picking more the assortment of things your Linux will come with and how the OS will lay things out. It sounds awfully convoluted but really you can’t go wrong here, this is such a wide community and there are guides and how tos for just about everything.
Also something to note is that the KDE Plasma desktop environment has a very similar layout to Windows 10/11. It feels incredibly similar, honestly almost 1:1 in some aspects. Tons of distributions use it as their primary DE, or at least give you the option of using it
I work in Windows (company provided laptop) so on average I spend less time on my Linux PC. And I completely agree with you.
KDE as been my go-to desktop because of the familiarity. Some people argue that it has too much costumisation but the defaults give you everything to run a modern PC. While still allowing you to venture into the “terminal”.
Win 7 looks seems like a positive to me tbh, I’ll go for looks later on, first want to understand the system better
Idk man Mint feels modern as hell now
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!
One bit of advice I will give you because I haven’t seen anyone else offer it: partition your drive and look up how to install your /home to a separate partition from root.
Give the /home partition most of the space because that’s where everything goes. By doing this, you can completely wipe your system drive and reinstall even a different distribution and’s basically lose nothing. Just in case everything really goes to hell and you can’t repair it without a reinstall.
This was quite easy to do with Mint, but I did need to follow directions as you have to deviate from just following defaults for everything.
I did manage to get seperate partitions, allocating 20 gb for the root. Now I’m installing software and it keeps saying the root is full… Does it not automatically install in /home? I can’t find a way to point installers to the home partition…
The Linux system and applications get installed to root. /home is for user applications, documents, etc. everything that would be account-based on windows.
Depending on the size of your drive I might allocate 50gb or more to root. I have 250gb allocated and 46.65 are used. Everything else can go to /home.
Mine looks like this.
Thanks, I just went with suggestions. Think I’ll need to reinstall to make a better sized root, unfortunately, but that’s for tomorrow
Oh yeah, suggesting Linux partitioning to a noob… lmao I use Linux for years with many distros and I still don’t understand this part.
People partition windows systems all the time. It’s not hard.
Yeah, but Windows partitions are pretty easy to understand since you don’t have a bunch of different extra partitions and filesystems that also differ between distros. You typically just make a C partition, pray that its size will be enough for the next years, and then make a second one for all of your data. You don’t have to think about root and boot partitions, which filesystem to chose, which name to give, how and if you should encrypt which partition, etc. etc. It’s all much more streamlined and well documented. On Linux every distro kinda does its own thing, so you can’t even just quickly look shit up. And if you want to encrypt things, suddenly all the guides are invalid anyway. It’s just messy and obtuse.
During Mint setup, it was surprisingly easy. Spent more time researching file systems. One GUI tool. Configured a swap, EFI, /, and /home. Very easy. I don’t know about other distros.
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.
Linux mint or fedora are great options. I’d probably recommend mint as usually geared more to those switching from windows and the forums and communities might be more helpful for beginners.
I’d avoid ubuntu these days. While not horrendous, i’ve run into enough annoyances with their snap package manager that there’s just no reason to learn this additional thing for a beginner.
