Changed out wife’s windows machine for a Linux Mint machine a few days ago. Microsoft finally irritated my last nerve. She’s doing OK with it.
Her old windows machine is now a unix (FreeBSD) machine.
For those who want to take a look at Linux Mint, the standard download allows you to boot up Linux without affecting your windows installation using a thumb drive.
Thank you. You made an important point. When you run Linux from a stick it is inert and does nothing at all to the windows OS or internal drive. So it doesn’t hurt anything to plug it in and play with it.
And here is a tip, when you have a windows PC crash you can also use this Linux stick to go save your files off to other sticks/drives before you reinstall the windows again. Because if not windows will force you to lose everything.
So everyone should have a portable Linux stick around even if it is just to retrieve files when their MS crashes. This is about the only way to retrieve files like this and not lose them all.