Hey everyone! I'm a complete newbie to Linux and a friend suggested I try Mint. I have this laptop for school that's provided by my region, so I can do what I want with it. However, the specs are quite low with just a 128GB UFS drive, which is soldered in, meaning I can't add more storage. I need Windows 11 for some pre-installed software, which I think could be useful, but I don't want to clutter my system since uninstalling the software just leaves me with a poorly functioning laptop. In Windows, my drive shows about 91GB available. If I delete everything from Windows apart from this software (which is around 5-10GB), do you think I can manage to dual boot Mint? Or should I consider other versions like the Cinnamon or MATE editions? By the way, I've never partitioned a drive before, so any help would be appreciated. Thanks for reading!
2 Answers
Honestly, your space is pretty tight. If you absolutely need to keep that pre-installed software on Windows and there's no equivalent running on Linux, staying with Windows might be best. If the software isn't crucial, consider fully switching to Mint and ditching Windows altogether!
Instead of installing Linux on your drive, you could use a live environment. Most distros, including Mint, let you boot from a USB without installing anything. This way, you can access your Windows files if they aren't encrypted, and if you disable fast startup in Windows, you might avoid issues.
That's an interesting idea, but the goal here is to primarily use Linux. A live environment wouldn't achieve that if I need to fall back on Windows for anything.
The software is mostly small apps I haven't looked into yet, and it could be handy to have them around. I just don't want to go through a massive list to check their compatibility with Wine.