Now i’ve been considering moving to linux. I don’t have much of a history using a computer and find it tougher to use than my phone. But I also really appreciate the foss movement. I’ve currently got an old laptop running windows 11 I think and it would prolly speed up with linux too. But I’m afraid I’d fuck smth up trying to download linux, understand it or while using it. Is it worth switching and how different is it to a windows experience.
If you’re not doing anything crazy, there’s no reason linux should be any harder to use than Windows.
Once you’re up and running, daily life will be pretty straightforward.
Plenty of great advice in the other posts that I won’t rehash. One thing I didn’t see mentioned is using a live boot to try out linux. You can basically run it off a USB stick before you install it to get a feel for what it’s like. Most “beginner friendly” distros will have tutorials on how to create the live disk. Example for Pop!_OS: https://support.system76.com/articles/live-disk/
This 100x, I got lucky in that I had separate hardware for exactly this purpose.
If you can run it on seperate hardware, do it. You’ll have no worries of data loss or other miscellaneous shitfuckery. If not, live boot is your best friend, assuming you don’t delete system32 (Linux let’s you break things like windows used to).