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Go to Microcenter and buy 3 USB sticks. Make sure one is big enough for backing up all you home / documents directory. Make sure the others are of good size too, 32GB is more than enough.

Go home and make a copy of your home directory onto one of the disks. It will take a while.

Go here: www.microsoft.com/en-us/…/windows11 And follow one of the instructions on making Windows 11 bootable media with your second disk. Test that it works then set it aside.

Go to Ventoy’s website and download it here: www.ventoy.net/en/download.html Follow the instructions and make the third USB stick a Ventoy disk. Ventoy lets you load multiple ISO files on a single disk.

Go to distrowatch.com and pick some distros, some operating systems. Download the ISOs and drop them in empty partition on your ventoy disk. Don’t forget you may need to change the boot order in your UEFI/BIOS to boot to it,

Explore and have fun.

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salarua@sopuli.xyz ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I’m not sure how techy @Kewlio250@lemmy.zip is, and Distrowatch can be pretty overwhelming, so here are a couple of recommendations from someone who’s tried a bunch of distros:

Linux Mint: Very close to Windows 7 in experience, with some modern touch-ups here and there. What I’d recommend for longtime Windows users.

Elementary OS: Gives off a lot of macOS vibes, and while it’s not very customizable, a ton of care has been put into the experience. Ideal for someone with basic computer needs that wants something that just works. (The website asks you to donate; if you can’t or don’t want to, enter $0 as a custom donation amount to get it for free.)

Fedora Workstation: Genuinely different experience from Windows and macOS. It reminds me of the experiments in the early '10s in creating a “convergent” interface, but this is stable, functional, and mature. Really shines if you have a touchpad.
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imecth@fedia.io ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Ventoy is probably not the best thing to recommend.

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- deathbird@mander.xyz ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  That’s somewhat concerning, but without a similar tool as an alternative or a clearly malicious incident I’m probably not going to stop using it any time soon. I only scratched the surface of one of those references anyway, and looks like digging through them to see the discourse and the meta-discourse would take a little while.
  
  If it’s a point of genuine concern however, there’s always Rufus or Etcher for writing a single ISO at a time, unless they are blob-dependent too. Or dd haha
  
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