Put it on a flash drive. Boot it. When asked “do you want to install mint or do you want to try it out”, click “try it out”. You’ll end up in a live environment of Mint (a copy that doesn’t save any changes/downloaded files) that you can explore all you want. Unless you start messing with the hard drive from there, you can change most settings without any risk of breaking anything. If you mess something up, turn it off and boot it again.
If Mint doesn’t run to your liking, grab another Linux distro and try that from your flash drive. Find out which one feels best to you and install that to the laptop.
Just be aware that Linux running from a flash drive will probably be quite slow compared to real Linux.
Just be aware that Linux running from a flash drive will probably be quite slow compared to real Linux.
Put an SSD into a USB 3.2 enclosure, and use Ventoy to add ISOs. You can select the distro at boot, and it runs fast enough that the difference between an installed drive isn’t noticeable.
The difference compared to a flash drive is brilliant, it’s ridiculously fast in comparison.
That sure would be a lot faster, but I doubt USB would be all that fast on a 10 year old Dell. Also, if a decade old Dell is your platform of choice, I’m not sure if spending 150 bucks on an SSD + enclosure is worth the money. Probably best to upgrade the internal drive and memory first.
It works well on my 7 year old laptop and my 10 year old media server :)
I don’t know about prices anywhere else, but I bought a 500GB SSD and a Sabrent enclosure about a month ago for £20 each. Like you said, it’s better to upgrade the computer first, if it hasn’t been already, but if you use portable storage regularly, it’s worth it.
Mint is pretty close to “for dummies”.
Put it on a flash drive. Boot it. When asked “do you want to install mint or do you want to try it out”, click “try it out”. You’ll end up in a live environment of Mint (a copy that doesn’t save any changes/downloaded files) that you can explore all you want. Unless you start messing with the hard drive from there, you can change most settings without any risk of breaking anything. If you mess something up, turn it off and boot it again.
If Mint doesn’t run to your liking, grab another Linux distro and try that from your flash drive. Find out which one feels best to you and install that to the laptop.
Just be aware that Linux running from a flash drive will probably be quite slow compared to real Linux.
Put an SSD into a USB 3.2 enclosure, and use Ventoy to add ISOs. You can select the distro at boot, and it runs fast enough that the difference between an installed drive isn’t noticeable.
The difference compared to a flash drive is brilliant, it’s ridiculously fast in comparison.
That sure would be a lot faster, but I doubt USB would be all that fast on a 10 year old Dell. Also, if a decade old Dell is your platform of choice, I’m not sure if spending 150 bucks on an SSD + enclosure is worth the money. Probably best to upgrade the internal drive and memory first.
It works well on my 7 year old laptop and my 10 year old media server :)
I don’t know about prices anywhere else, but I bought a 500GB SSD and a Sabrent enclosure about a month ago for £20 each. Like you said, it’s better to upgrade the computer first, if it hasn’t been already, but if you use portable storage regularly, it’s worth it.