A good start is to go to distrowatch and look at the popular distros. Anything in the top 15 should work great. For beginners I would pick among MX Linux, EndeavourOS, Fedora, OpenSUSE, or Ubuntu/an Ubuntu-based distro like Linux Mint or Pop!_OS. You can click on their name and read a bit about them and download the ISO either from the “home page” link under the description, or by scrolling down to the release announcements and clicking there.
I highly recommend Ventoy. You can download that, plug in a removable storage device, then run Ventoy2Disk. It will guide you through installing it to the removable storage, and once you do all you need to do is drag the .iso files onto the drive. You can put as many iso files as you like and Ventoy will let you choose which one you want to use when you reboot. All of the ones I mentioned above have a “live” environment meaning that you can try them out freely without doing anything permanent. MX Linux even gives you the option of saving the changes you make in the live environment so you can install software that will be there the next time you boot into the live environment.
For the reason above if you’re lost on where to start, grab an iso of MX-21.3_x64 if your hardware is older or MX-21.3_x64 “ahs” if it’s newer from their website, slap the iso on the device with Ventoy, reboot, press F11 or whatever at your BIOS splash screen to change the boot device to the one with the iso, then just follow the instructions to boot into MX and go to town.
Feel free to let me know if you have any other questions or need more help.
A good start is to go to distrowatch and look at the popular distros. Anything in the top 15 should work great. For beginners I would pick among MX Linux, EndeavourOS, Fedora, OpenSUSE, or Ubuntu/an Ubuntu-based distro like Linux Mint or Pop!_OS. You can click on their name and read a bit about them and download the ISO either from the “home page” link under the description, or by scrolling down to the release announcements and clicking there.
I highly recommend Ventoy. You can download that, plug in a removable storage device, then run Ventoy2Disk. It will guide you through installing it to the removable storage, and once you do all you need to do is drag the .iso files onto the drive. You can put as many iso files as you like and Ventoy will let you choose which one you want to use when you reboot. All of the ones I mentioned above have a “live” environment meaning that you can try them out freely without doing anything permanent. MX Linux even gives you the option of saving the changes you make in the live environment so you can install software that will be there the next time you boot into the live environment.
For the reason above if you’re lost on where to start, grab an iso of MX-21.3_x64 if your hardware is older or MX-21.3_x64 “ahs” if it’s newer from their website, slap the iso on the device with Ventoy, reboot, press F11 or whatever at your BIOS splash screen to change the boot device to the one with the iso, then just follow the instructions to boot into MX and go to town.
Feel free to let me know if you have any other questions or need more help.
Cool beans.
Yeah, I just need something useful.