Mastodawn

If ever there was a right place to ask this question: what’s the easiest way to help a person off of Windows on their laptop to Linux Mint? Like is there a nice bootable USB image they can have a mess around with and still use their Windows drive? So they can be happy to backup, nuke windows and install Mint.

@emsquared I think you might have tips here ?

This account has moved Dec 5

@bobthomson70 Well obviously they can run the Linux Mint install usb from the USB stick "live" just to see if they want to install though you can't save anything unless you burn the iso with the ability to do so (persistence I think it's called) but unless you do that on a really fast usb it'll slow the "live" demo environment down. You could also just run a virtual version within Windows (virtual box or similar virtual machine apps)

MostlyTato Dec 5

@emsquared @bobthomson70

There is also Distrosea, where you can test it online.

https://distrosea.com/select/linuxmint/

Try Linux Mint online on DistroSea

Quickly try out Linux Mint online on your web browser on DistroSea

DistroSea

This account has moved Dec 5

@MostlyTato @bobthomson70 Oooh good call.

@emsquared @bobthomson70 Something that I've had fun with is installing various Linux distros to a thumb drive. Not the live installer, but the whole-ass OS.

Doing this, I discovered that some dog shit Windows PC we had a work was actually a perfectly fine computer. Kubuntu ran absolutely flawlessly through USB, while the Win10 install on the spinning HDD takes literally 20 minutes to become usable.

The only thing there is needing to set the BIOS to boot from the thumb drive.

This account has moved Dec 5

@bobthomson70 if they then want to trying it then you''ll need to create space for a spare partition (you can do this from the live usb install) so you retain windows and have a dual boot option so not throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Bob Thomson Dec 5

@emsquared Last time I did such things was probably 2001 hehe good that it seems to have gotten a lot easier.

Raymond Russell Dec 5

@emsquared @bobthomson70
I did a dual boot for a while on one of my laptops and when I wanted to make it Mint only I found it a bit of a pain.
I basically made the Mint partition a bit too small and decided to go full Mint because my other machine was fine with Mint only. So it was kind of a cock up on my part but It also took a bit of effort to fix.

This account has moved Dec 5

@raymierussell @bobthomson70 It is a pain if you are not used to partitioning or partition resizing (man you should see my old laptop with around 12 partitions..What a faff). Ubuntu used to do a versionl that installed within windows (now defunct).Not ideal but was a good easy to grasp start for beginners.

Raymond Russell Dec 5

@emsquared @bobthomson70
My laptop had a fairly large but full hdd before the dual boot. So I installed mint and it worked but I wanted to some Video Encoding as a test and I didn't leave myself an awful lot of space.

Also UEFI , safe boot at al BIOS stuff getting chucked into the mix doesn't help.

Raymond Russell Dec 5

@emsquared @bobthomson70
I don't know how I managed it but after the dual boot I couldn't get it to boot from the USB to live boot so I could simple do a reinstall of Mint only.
I had to do some jiggery pokery which I honestly can't remember anything of other than relief when it finally worked.

Bob Thomson Dec 5

@raymierussell @emsquared the paritcularly challenging part for me is I would be doing all this on French language install with an AZERTY keyboard ;)

Raymond Russell Dec 5

@bobthomson70 @emsquared

Oh la la!

Bob Thomson Dec 5

@raymierussell @emsquared bah ouais! Ce n'est pas simple :)

Raymond Russell Dec 5

@bobthomson70 @emsquared

WTF. no translate button my 2nd year French doesn't stretch that far...Quelle domage.

Bob Thomson Dec 5

@raymierussell @emsquared j’ai fait un erreur. I should have said - pas facile. “Well yeah it’s not easy” :)

Bob Thomson Dec 5

@emsquared @raymierussell likes of me disk partioning etc, piece of piss, but that's on numerous other *ixes ;) Done it on RHEL and Ubuntu and such etc, but that sort of thing is seldom tweaked much on servers and these days all images on cloud providers.