mint (Public Board)
Pop, do you still use mint? What's your experience?
The missus is thinking of switching from windows but she has a couple of critical programs which don't have linux replacements that she knows of.
My track record
by Cornpop Sutton 
, A bad bad dude who makes good shine., Tuesday, April 14, 2026, 20:45 (10 hours, 5 minutes ago) @ ,ndo
I set up my desktop PC in 2017 with Linux Mint and haven't looked back.
If you use the search box in the upper right and search Linux Mint (no quotes required in the box) you should be able to browse everything I've written about it here.
To bottom line:
FSK suggested "dual boot". I'll clarify the steps:
Download a Linux Mint DVD image and either burn it to a DVD or use a program like "Rufus" or "Balena Etcher" (both open source) to write the bootable image to a USB key. The USB option is probably less hassle.
Boot your PC from the USB or burned DVD, let it take its defaults, and when it loads, your PC will be running Mint but from the boot media, not from the hard drive (Windows will still be intact.) This is the "Live image".
If you want to install Linux so your computer actually runs Linux as default, Mint's live image has an installer available from the desktop.
If you have enough available hard drive or C: drive space you should be able to use options that let you keep Windows as a boot option. You'll probably have to compact the partitions and rearrange things in order to make this happen.
This is a thread about using Windows within Linux, as a virtual machine: https://deplorablecoder.club/index.php?id=24229
I even set up a Windows 11 virtual machine, using a free well known activation key that seems to be stable, which allowed me to use Turbotax for taxes this year.