this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2025
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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...
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
Do it!
You tried it on an old laptop before. If that or some other spare machine is still available, that would make a perfect machine to try and do everything while your battlestation is still there for things you can't figure out immediately.
yeah that ancient Sony Vaio is loooong gone. it was manufactured in 2008 or something and was a hand me down from my aunt. we haven't had it since like 2021
but i do have a laptop outside my main rig and I'm gonna try booting mint off an external drive just to try it out and see how i like the feel again!
Nice. Just do your best not to fall back on Windows too quickly. Really try to do everything on the laptop first. Except for work. If something isn't working just do it on Windows and move on in that case.
Good luck.
... okay so uh
i'm probably gonna have to go somewhere more help-focused and immediate than this but
something weird happened.
i bought a brand new USB drive to act as my linux mint boot media and flashed the iso onto it.
it booted into the temporary instance easily! instantly! I started to install thinking i could just set up dual boot with the extant windows instance.
well... it got to the point where it said "hey wait you have to disable secureboot or you have to reformat your entire windows installation"
okay maybe i want to check ONE MORE TIME to see if there's anything in this windows instance that I still want.
so i halt the linux mint installation process and go back into windows. I take one last catalogue of stuff i'd want to reference later, and then try to boot back into the linux mint live session straight from the usb stick
.... nope.
it says 'something has gone terribly wrong' and 'failed to load UEFI' or something
but that's not the thing that really spooked me because I thought I could go back into windows, reformat the USB key, and just re-flash the linux mint iso and start over from scratch
that's all background stuff, here's the important crazy thing:
the USB key is now reading that it only has a size of FIVE. MEGABYTES. FIVE.
EVEN IF I TRY TO REFORMAT IT, IT STILL IS CONVINCED IT'S ONLY FIVE MEGABYTES
the linux mint iso can't even FIT on it now
i can't even reflash it
i ... but ... how do i even ...
WAT
This happens sometimes. You flashed it in a way that makes Windows not recognize the full drive. Usually happens with
ddflashing or Rufus'ddflash mode. I can't remember what tool I usually use to fix my USB sticks, but there will be a way.Also, just in case, check the computer's Secure Boot settings in case something changed that won't let the USB boot anymore.
it happened with etcher, and then continued to happen with rufus. i didn't even try dd flash mode at first.
what's crazy is, it WORKED ONCE. ONCE!
I almost wonder if windows somehow detected that another OS ran on the silicon and said "ohhhh no you fucking don't, FUCK YOU ONLY I GET TO BE YOUR OPERATING SYSTEM!!!"
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"