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Prepping the PC

This section will be all about preparing your computer to migrate to Linux is a mostly seemless way possible.

MAKE BACKUPS

BACKUPS! BACKUPS! BACKUPS! MAKE. FUCKING. BACKUPS!

Make ya damn backups! This step is different for everyone cause we all store different things on our systems. Just make sure to back up EVERYTHING you will want (and if you're planning on running a Windows VM on your systm, backup your GPUs BIOS to be able to modify it later on).

Choosing the right distro

I am going to make this simple to save you time and effort with choosing. I know the Linux experience is distro hopping when you commit to find what works, but that sucks to do and we all hate doing it, so there's 2 real distros I would recommend depending on your computer knowledge

Linux Mint

If you use computers to game and/or just use them, use Linux Mint. It's an Ubuntu based distro without snaps. It runs the Cinnamon Desktop and is very light on the system.

Installing Mint is very simple, few clicks to select language, install multimedia codecs, partition the drive, and setting your account will take roughly 3 minutes to do.

After you install the system you'll notice you have a text editor, media player, and a browser installed, and a few other apps.

Arch Linux

If you understand computers a bit more and have tinkered with Linux in the past, I would recommend Arch Linux. Arch is closer to a DIY setup than Mint, but it's still a "just works" distro unline Gentoo. It's also a "bleeding-edge" distro, which just means it gets updates a lot sooner.

Installing arch has gotten a lot simpler with archinstall. archinstall is the fucking best thing ever. Imaging everything about arch but with the simple install setup as other Operating Systems.

When you boot the iso and you verify you have internet and that you're booted into UEFI if you choose to be, run archinstall and go through each section and select what you want to use. (I will write a more detailed description of this later on)

After installing your version of linux, go to the post install page to get used to your new system.