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!
Which flavor did you choose? I am now rocking basic mint with XFCE on my older machine and LMDE on newer.
Cinnamon I think
That’s the Mint classic option and a great one. It’s an easy mainline go to for users with all the basics baked in.
How do you like LMDE vs regular Mint?
It is little bit more buggier but it may be the hardware and I can’t get it with xfce.
I don’t want to mess that deep in the system, just get it to my favorite theme and leave it be. So it is basically out of the box experience.