https://linuxmint.com/ is one of the easiest and straightforward ones to get into, comes with everything you need stock pretty much, pick the "XFCE" edition if you have a very old PC, otherwise the "Cinnamon" edition is best imo, most "Windows like" experience
Also I might suggest actually dumping the garbage OS from an obvious evil company, that was founded by Bill fucking Gates and just use Linux exclusively already... Can't really understand how so many awakened people haven't done that already at this point
Feel free to ask any questions about Linux you might have.
Powered through and made a bootable Linux OS from a 256 Gb flash drive. However the flash drive now only has a capacity of 5 Mb (FAT). Did I screw up, or do I make another partition on the USB drive somehow? I was hoping to backup all my files to the USB in case I'm going to re-format the laptop <gasp> for Linux in the near future...these are not things to take lightly.
It should boot from it, I think it uses a single partition and it becomes hidden, that's why you can't use it, not entirely sure if that's it though, this method is ok when using a around 4GB pen drive, but yeah, losing all of the 265GB is a pain.
It's a different approach, and a much better one actually, it makes so you can boot ISO images without even having to burn them, you just install ventoy to your 256GB flash drive, then drop the linux images in the ISOS folder (that it will create)
Then you boot from the drive and you'll see a list of all the images you have there
You can also use the rest of the flash drive normally, it uses just a small portion of it for the bootable part
I'll explain how to use it step by step if you need it
Where to go for such a Linux option?
https://linuxmint.com/ is one of the easiest and straightforward ones to get into, comes with everything you need stock pretty much, pick the "XFCE" edition if you have a very old PC, otherwise the "Cinnamon" edition is best imo, most "Windows like" experience
https://mxlinux.org/ is also good
Pretty much 99% of all distributions are live systems you can use, just burn the ISO to a pen drive or DVD and you're golden
This is a good tool to use for burning them to a pen drive https://etcher.balena.io/
But a better, and slightly more technical solution, is this https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html
Also I might suggest actually dumping the garbage OS from an obvious evil company, that was founded by Bill fucking Gates and just use Linux exclusively already... Can't really understand how so many awakened people haven't done that already at this point
Feel free to ask any questions about Linux you might have.
Powered through and made a bootable Linux OS from a 256 Gb flash drive. However the flash drive now only has a capacity of 5 Mb (FAT). Did I screw up, or do I make another partition on the USB drive somehow? I was hoping to backup all my files to the USB in case I'm going to re-format the laptop <gasp> for Linux in the near future...these are not things to take lightly.
It should boot from it, I think it uses a single partition and it becomes hidden, that's why you can't use it, not entirely sure if that's it though, this method is ok when using a around 4GB pen drive, but yeah, losing all of the 265GB is a pain.
Here's a much better solution for you https://www.ventoy.net/en/index.html
It's a different approach, and a much better one actually, it makes so you can boot ISO images without even having to burn them, you just install ventoy to your 256GB flash drive, then drop the linux images in the ISOS folder (that it will create)
Then you boot from the drive and you'll see a list of all the images you have there
You can also use the rest of the flash drive normally, it uses just a small portion of it for the bootable part
I'll explain how to use it step by step if you need it
+1 for Ventoy. It allows you to easily drop multiple distro ISOs so you can have one USB with a whole bunch of LiveUSB images to try out.