Go to Microcenter and buy 3 USB sticks. Make sure one is big enough for backing up all you home / documents directory. Make sure the others are of good size too, 32GB is more than enough.
Go home and make a copy of your home directory onto one of the disks. It will take a while.
Go to Ventoy’s website and download it here: https://www.ventoy.net/en/download.html
Follow the instructions and make the third USB stick a Ventoy disk. Ventoy lets you load multiple ISO files on a single disk.
Go to https://distrowatch.com/ and pick some distros, some operating systems. Download the ISOs and drop them in empty partition on your ventoy disk. Don’t forget you may need to change the boot order in your UEFI/BIOS to boot to it,
Thank you so much for being educational instead of snarky!
If the OP commenter does stick with Windows for whatever reason, please look into ChrisTitusTech’s WinUtil. This is what I had to do to get my Windows SSD to work the way I want it to.
It never hurts to have an SSD for both if needed! :-]
I’m not sure how techy @[email protected] is, and Distrowatch can be pretty overwhelming, so here are a couple of recommendations from someone who’s tried a bunch of distros:
Linux Mint: Very close to Windows 7 in experience, with some modern touch-ups here and there. What I’d recommend for longtime Windows users.
Elementary OS: Gives off a lot of macOS vibes, and while it’s not very customizable, a ton of care has been put into the experience. Ideal for someone with basic computer needs that wants something that just works. (The website asks you to donate; if you can’t or don’t want to, enter $0 as a custom donation amount to get it for free.)
Fedora Workstation: Genuinely different experience from Windows and macOS. It reminds me of the experiments in the early '10s in creating a “convergent” interface, but this is stable, functional, and mature. Really shines if you have a touchpad.
How would I do this?
You can still download Windows 10 directly from Microsoft: https://www.microsoft.com/de-de/software-download/windows10ISO
Why would I do this either?
Go to Microcenter and buy 3 USB sticks. Make sure one is big enough for backing up all you home / documents directory. Make sure the others are of good size too, 32GB is more than enough.
Go home and make a copy of your home directory onto one of the disks. It will take a while.
Go here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows11 And follow one of the instructions on making Windows 11 bootable media with your second disk. Test that it works then set it aside.
Go to Ventoy’s website and download it here: https://www.ventoy.net/en/download.html Follow the instructions and make the third USB stick a Ventoy disk. Ventoy lets you load multiple ISO files on a single disk.
Go to https://distrowatch.com/ and pick some distros, some operating systems. Download the ISOs and drop them in empty partition on your ventoy disk. Don’t forget you may need to change the boot order in your UEFI/BIOS to boot to it,
Explore and have fun.
Thank you so much for being educational instead of snarky!
If the OP commenter does stick with Windows for whatever reason, please look into ChrisTitusTech’s WinUtil. This is what I had to do to get my Windows SSD to work the way I want it to.
It never hurts to have an SSD for both if needed! :-]
I’m not sure how techy @[email protected] is, and Distrowatch can be pretty overwhelming, so here are a couple of recommendations from someone who’s tried a bunch of distros:
Ventoy is probably not the best thing to recommend.