Thank you all who reached out, it really was awesome.
Was super easy, even my Nvidia cards driver was basically automated. Haven’t played anything yet but I’m sure I’ll be fine.
I opened up the command thingy a couple of times just to get some settings how I wanted them, but could have gotten by without it.
The biggest stumbling block for me personally was getting the thumb drive in order, then the hardware to boot from it. First you gotta use a thing called Rufus to format the drive correctly, not sure how or why, but you do.
And then I couldn’t get my laptop to load bios no matter what key/s I mashed at restart, but searching " advanced startup options" in settings brought me to a menu to reboot from my (now correctly formatted) USB drive.
The rest drove itself. Still some stuff to figure out with it but it’s doable. Very polished and user friendly.Thank you all again so much!
If you happen to care, what you were doing with the program Rufus was creating a “bootable media”. Think back in the day when you had to buy a Windows CD and insert that to install or update Windows. This is kind of the evolution of that. An operating system installer can be loaded into a thumb drive (some utilities even let you put many on one drive, and then you can choose between them) and then you tell your computer to read from the USB drive first (which you did via the BIOS boot menu configuration) and instead of booting up your installed Windows, it gives you the option of installing whatever is on your USB drive.
This is fortunately often a pretty painless process, creating the USB boot loaders isn’t hard, and virtually every single Linux distro out there can be installed in this way.
Glad you’re enjoying Mint, and excellent choice for a new Linux user. If you like it, you’ll never need to change to anything else.
Welcome!
Ya I was wondering why I couldn’t download it in that state already directly to the drive. But I suppose there was already some formatting that needed to be stripped down before it could function as a boot strapper or whatever it’s called.
Seriously thank you all for reaching out. I thought like maybe one person would begrudgingly link me a copy of Linux for dummies, but you all were so helpful!
And it really wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. I have memories of messing with Linux in like… 04 or 5 maybe? The ease of use has come a long way, applications are just working without fuss. 10/10
Linux is built by the community for the community. I think trying to help people move to linux is just in just in linux users blood 😅
I think a better analogy is “remember when you had an iso that you had to burn onto a DVD to be able to boot from it? Or to be able to have the CD player recognize it instead of just writing the songs into it?, sort of the same thing”.
What you downloaded is a binary image, i.e. the sequence of 0 and 1 needed for a computer to boot into Linux, now you need to feed that sequence directly to the computer, but the computer only knows how to read it from a thumb drive directly, not from a file inside the thumb drive, so you need to write that sequence bit by bit in order on the thumb drive. Back in the day we used Nero for dvds, Rufus does the same but to a thumb drive.
Fun fact in Linux you can use
ddwhich unlike what most people say doesn’t stand for Disk Destroyer (although certainly lots of disks were destroyed by it), which is an application that does binary writes. Hell, in Linux you can actually docat image.iso > /dev/sdband that should work, that is essentially print the output of the file image.iso and write it into/dev/sdbwhich should be the second disk plugged to your system (first one being/dev/sda).Cool, I started using Linux back in 04, but I think not that much changed, I think it’s mostly people who change the way they look at Linux, outside of gaming, for day to day use, Linux was very usable even back then.