i appreciate the encouragement _ you know, maybe. I’m haunted by this fear (I try to tell myself it’s an irrational one) that attempting to get into linux now would mess things up for me and that i’d end up stranded and unable to get back but … mint is admittedly VERY APPROACHABLE… hm. Maybe I can drop by staples and buy a spare thumbdrive, put a mint boot image on it, and try it on my battlestation today.
If you have an “old laptop” or something like that kicking around, I recommend installing Linux on that and trying to use that for as many of your work/school/productivity/whatever tasks as you can while you still have a Windows machine.
There will be a transition period, Linux is not Windows and Libreoffice isn’t MS Office. I spent about two years occasionally running into variations of this scenario:
I need to do a thing.
This is a simple thing I do regularly. I can do it in seconds on Windows.
It’s not done the way I’m used to on Linux; the button for it isn’t where I’d think to find it.
What do you even call this thing? How do I google how to do it?
Dang it I’m wasting so much time on this. I need to turn this in soon, it’s eating up too much time.
I’m getting frustrated because I don’t have the time at this moment to learn how to do this, I just need it done.
It helped me to be able to stop, boot into Windows, get it done so I could move on, and when the pressure of a deadline is off, suddenly it’s easier to learn how to do it in Linux. Then you know how and you don’t have to boot into Windows for that thing. It prevents those FUCK THIS I"M GONG BACK TO WINDOWS I DON"T CARE ANYMORE !!!1!! moments.
You always have the option of partitioning some free space on your hard drive and dual boot windows along side Linux Mint until you’re 100% confident in erasing windows from the drive. When I first got started with it years ago I had similar fears that something would go wrong with the process or there would be driver issues or I wouldn’t be able to start my favorite software. So I dual booted windows on my laptop for about a year until I realized I hadnt needed to use windows at all.
Seconding the person saying not to dual boot on a new partition. That was how I started with Linux like 10 years ago, and even then Windows would fuck up grub every time it updated and it took me ages to learn how to get boot into Linux again. Plus if you ever decide to ditch windows entirely, wiping that partition and adding it to the Linux one can be a pain in the ass.
If all you have is a laptop and a dream, maybe that’s the way. But if there are any other options…
to make the transition smoother, first find out what programs you will be needing and if they are natively supported on linux. and if not, what are the alternatives.
try mint in the live usb thing first and you have some free space on your disk, install mint alongside windows for dual booting…or use virtualbox. this way you can take a peek and realize you don’t need no microshiets
Absolute worst case scenario, you have to reinstall Windows, and that’s really no harder than installing Linux in the first place. I don’t think there’s a situation where you’d wind up “stranded”
i appreciate the encouragement _ you know, maybe. I’m haunted by this fear (I try to tell myself it’s an irrational one) that attempting to get into linux now would mess things up for me and that i’d end up stranded and unable to get back but … mint is admittedly VERY APPROACHABLE… hm. Maybe I can drop by staples and buy a spare thumbdrive, put a mint boot image on it, and try it on my battlestation today.
If you have an “old laptop” or something like that kicking around, I recommend installing Linux on that and trying to use that for as many of your work/school/productivity/whatever tasks as you can while you still have a Windows machine.
There will be a transition period, Linux is not Windows and Libreoffice isn’t MS Office. I spent about two years occasionally running into variations of this scenario:
I need to do a thing.
This is a simple thing I do regularly. I can do it in seconds on Windows.
It’s not done the way I’m used to on Linux; the button for it isn’t where I’d think to find it.
What do you even call this thing? How do I google how to do it?
Dang it I’m wasting so much time on this. I need to turn this in soon, it’s eating up too much time.
I’m getting frustrated because I don’t have the time at this moment to learn how to do this, I just need it done.
It helped me to be able to stop, boot into Windows, get it done so I could move on, and when the pressure of a deadline is off, suddenly it’s easier to learn how to do it in Linux. Then you know how and you don’t have to boot into Windows for that thing. It prevents those FUCK THIS I"M GONG BACK TO WINDOWS I DON"T CARE ANYMORE !!!1!! moments.
You always have the option of partitioning some free space on your hard drive and dual boot windows along side Linux Mint until you’re 100% confident in erasing windows from the drive. When I first got started with it years ago I had similar fears that something would go wrong with the process or there would be driver issues or I wouldn’t be able to start my favorite software. So I dual booted windows on my laptop for about a year until I realized I hadnt needed to use windows at all.
I wouldn’t recommend dual-booting via partition. If you have a spare SATA port, just grab a small SSD and use that instead.
Seconding the person saying not to dual boot on a new partition. That was how I started with Linux like 10 years ago, and even then Windows would fuck up grub every time it updated and it took me ages to learn how to get boot into Linux again. Plus if you ever decide to ditch windows entirely, wiping that partition and adding it to the Linux one can be a pain in the ass.
If all you have is a laptop and a dream, maybe that’s the way. But if there are any other options…
Do it!
to make the transition smoother, first find out what programs you will be needing and if they are natively supported on linux. and if not, what are the alternatives.
try mint in the live usb thing first and you have some free space on your disk, install mint alongside windows for dual booting…or use virtualbox. this way you can take a peek and realize you don’t need no microshiets
Absolute worst case scenario, you have to reinstall Windows, and that’s really no harder than installing Linux in the first place. I don’t think there’s a situation where you’d wind up “stranded”