Linux Mint is a really good choice. I recently tried OpenSUSE and ran into all kinds of issues that I didn’t have with Mint. Hardware issues were the only issues I had with Mint. I prefer Xfce to Cinnamon though, preferably with the DesktopPal97 theme.

That is the extent of the help I can provide.

EDIT: Oh also, check that their hardware supports Linux. The glorious Arch wiki has that information available for a lot of distros.

I suggest Mint, don’t know if you’ve tried it but it seems like the best choice.

Bazzite is a gaming focussed distro and if you don’t really game you don’t need it. I tried using OpenSUSE and it’s really apparent that they’re focused more on system administrators than desktop users (and system administrators are the only ones they monetize).

In all seriousness, do you actually have any problems with Mint? Can’t really answer if we don’t know what you’re dissatisfied with in your current setup. I myself tried OpenSUSE because I wanted to give KDE a shot.

I have one in mind, I’ll tell you it if I remember the name.

If I run out of space I’ll just wipe and reinstall. Simple.

Looked it up and that’s wrong. An SSD doesn’t wear-level based on the partitions but on a firmware level.

Some of the responses I got were about how the swap partition is useless, and someone else replied to them that they were wrong. I haven’t responded to these people because I don’t yet understand who’s right. I’ll use a swap file or just no swap altogether once I check for myself if the anti-swap people are nutters. I assume temporary files aren’t saved to swap but instead to temp so I can’t imagine what it’s used for on an SSD.

I found yet another thing I’d need to manually install with OpenSUSE Leap (and at that point I may aswell use Arch with all it’s documentation glory). I didn’t have any of these issues with Ubuntu-based distros so I’m doing a fresh install with Kubuntu.

I’m gonna LVM it with two distros and a shared data partition.

Lost my license key anyway. Goodbye forever Windows 11.

Doesn’t matter anyway. It wouldn’t fit on my USB so I shrunk the partition and now my copy of Windows 11 is bricked.

Is your music listening a privacy concern?

Actually prosecuting the perpetrators rather than giving olive-branch after olive-branch like Biden did seems far more effective at reducing the risk of another coup (or electoral comeback based on claims the courts are being weaponized since they’re no conviction to point at).

Yep, gonna clone and delete Windows 11.

Library might work.

I’m using Mint for sensitive matters, I want to keep it separate from my daily driver.

I’ll basically just be using this laptop for web-browsing.

I don’t really use hibernation. I’ll need to enable swap encryption though.

Looks like it’s included in Ubuntu too, so I think I’ll use that (I’m changing to Kubuntu after yet again needing to find missing packages).

Well, I’m not doing that.

I’m an accounting graduate, so yes. Most things should be in a browser really, since generally a webpage can’t give you malware.

Could I preserve the activation key the refurbisher provided doing that (I’m gonna google whether I can anyway)?

My old laptop doesn’t have a TPM or Secureboot (or a working CTRL key). So that idea’s out.

I’ll try and put it on a VM, not sure whether that’ll preserve my key though.

I absolutely do not trust Windows 11 to be a good dual-boot citizen so I’m going to remove it. Gonna replace OpenSUSE with Kubuntu so I’ll do it then.

Time to clone and delete the Windows partition.