@Frondeur@Verfassungsschmutz@LivingSpaceStudios Using a bootable usb to install is generally a great idea too. There are tons of tools for free to do that from windows to get a USB stick/thumbdrive ready to install an .iso image.
Manjaro plasma is better than mint as a beginners OS and is closer to a windows feel. It also has a usb installer and a chroot script that automatically chroots into the system of you Bork it. It's arch adjacent, and so the packages are more current than debian / apt.
@Frondeur@Verfassungsschmutz@LivingSpaceStudios if you know how to install windows, this will be almost as easy, but just install an entry level Linux like others are saying. The first steps are mostly committing to either formatting the windows SSD/HDD or having a drive you can swap in to do a clean install of whatever .iso image you chose.
@Frondeur Beginners should just stick to Linux Mint. Some people will try to talk you into installing Arch (or other distros) for the memes but you should ignore them and stick with Linux Mint because it's easy, reliable and (generally) configured correctly out of the box.
Installing Linux Mint is basically the same as installing Windows from a USB drive or a disc, as shown in this video:
@Frondeur Linux is only a kernel, thus it is a poor replacement of windows and also going from a proprietary OS to a proprietary kernel won't achieve much.
That of course would require decent quality hardware - if you let me know what GPU and/or Wi-Fi card you have, I'll be able to advise the quality of such cards.
If it's Intel Integrated and a 1000BASE-T connection, it will work fine.
@Zergling_man@xaetacore@Frondeur >he can recommend linux-libre (probably doesn't support your hardware GNU Linux-libre supports 99% of the hardware that Linux does - it's only some GPUs and Wi-Fi cards that have quality issues and that don't work unless you load up proprietary software onto them.
@Frondeur A bunch of people are going to say "install xyz" and then argue with each other about why everyone else's choice sucks.
Choice of distro is much less important than choice of DE/WM. Most DEs are pretty similar, pick one and use it for a while and be ready to ditch it when you find something to hate about it.
Maybe grab like 5 spare USBs and put a different setup on each of them, try them for 5 minutes, pick one to install. (Or just grab one USB and put a bunch of different isos on it, but that means rebooting from disk inbetween since rewriting the flashdrive while it's the boot system is probably a bad idea - I've never actually tried it though so maybe everything necessary is in memory and you just can't open new things after. Having at least 2 flashdrives means you can just alternate them safely.)
When installing, look at what automatic partitioning wants to do, then do manual partitioning exactly like that except put /home on a different partition (or different disk). This way when you decide to nuke it (or it decides to nuke itself - ubuntu, manjaro) you just reinstall system, remount home, and go about your day unaffected. If automatic partitioning doesn't tell you what it wants to do, it's usually something like 50mb EFI (if using UEFI) at /boot, ~20% of disk at /, rest at /home (depends how many free games you will play).
If you are going to install on the same disk as Windows... It's better to just swap the disk honestly, but grub is usually pretty good at not destroying Windows. Windows will destroy grub at random if it wants to touch boot partitions for any reason (not sure when it will do this, I don't use Windows). Also you will probably need to tell Windows to set system clock to GMT instead of local time, because linux does the sane thing of using GMT for everything internal and applying timezone only upon display, and if you don't tell Windows to do it that sane way one of the clocks will always be out by several hours (actually not that big of a deal as long as it's in the future instead of in the past).
Install artix (distro) + xfce (de). Artix gives you choice of init system, literally doesn't matter you'll never use it, it's server shit (but so far I've found openrc easier to work with than s6, and I haven't tried runit, so JUST IN CASE I recommend openrc); you can just use arch+xfce instead and it's basically the same except I think artix is easier to install; I haven't tried installing arch for a PC before. Ubuntu fucking sucks because it does two releases a year (.04->April, .10->Oct, every even year's April release is long-term support) and either you stick on one version and end up with really old versions of shit (at my work we just spun up a 24.04 and I've already found python is outdated; granted I think it was current in April 2024) or you upgrade versions every so often which is just pain and suffering. Everything in debian's family is like this and it's all fucking shit. Rolling-release is god-tier.
cc @xaetacore so he can recommend gentoo (too much hassle) and @suiseiseki@freespeechextremist.com so he can recommend linux-libre (probably doesn't support your hardware 'cause ABSOLUTELY PROPRIETARY).