And what would be those “trade secrets”? The ability to make posts and have them being read by other people? I’m pretty sure every forum software since the '70s has prior art. Elons fragile narcissism know no bounds.

Download BalenaEtcher and burn an .ISO of your selected distro to a USB memory stick - Pop!OS and Linux mint are perennial favorites. Bear in mind that this will erase all data from the stick.

Boot the laptop into BIOS (you will need to check with the manufacturer to see which key you will need to hold to do so) and scroll down to the “boot from device” or similar option. Select “Boot from USB”, save settings and reset your laptop.

If all goes well, and your laptop likes the distro, you should see a bunch of cryptic text scroll by. Don’t worry, this is what Linux shows instead of a loading screen. A menu should pop up, asking you if you want to try out the Live distro, or install the OS. Choose the live distro first, this will create a version of the OS that works from the RAM disk and does not install on the hard drive.

You can now play around with the OS, browse the internet, play games, anything except saving locally to the hard drive (unless you Mount it, but that’s another story). When you are good and ready, you can either choose to dual boot to Linux and Windows, or take the plunge and use Linux as your primary OS!

Hope this explanation wasn’t too rambly. Have fun!

Depends what you mean by “best”. Personally, I use Lubuntu, as it is an ideal combo of features vs. resource lightness for me. Linux light and Puppy Linux are also among more popular lightweight distros.

As much as I try to sympathise with the author, he seems to suffer from a terminal case of Twitter-brain, where we all comment on the current-thing until we beat it into the ground and then find another current-thing to dissect to death. Some of us like to separate interest and usernames, without setting up a data mineable online profile. And what’s with Disord being touted as an alternative? It is ok for coordinating and communicating with your gaming buddies, but completely unusable for any forum acivity.

I bought the entire CPU, and I’m going to use the entire CPU.

The biggest mistake they made was using the awful new gnome desktop. Seriously, it feels like I’m using those shitty info kiosks you find in poorly maintained bus terminals. Fortunately, I have the option of booting into xfce, and Lubuntu on my laptop has Lxqt.

Snaps do feel like a half baked implementation though.

Error: Arch logo detected, coolness not found.

And then there’s me, who copy pastes terminal commands from the net without checking them :3