It may be one of the more powerful things you can do for personal and societal liberty.
Yes, I do think so.
The List Below Is Roughly In Order Of Safe and Easy To Committed and Advanced.
I’m going to assume Linux Mint in my examples, only because it is my favorite of the easy to use versions and the one I’m most familiar with. There are a ton of other very good Linux distributions as well. You can try them all if you like!
- Live USB/ DVD: You can just buy the medium from the Linux Mint store all set up for you and feel good that you contributed to the project, making quality free software available to others as well. You can follow this guide from Linux Mint to easily create a bootable media which will allow you to try the distribution or install it when you wish.
- Virtual Machine: A virtual machine is using software such as VirtualBox to install an operating system on your desktop that runs like a complete computer right inside your desktop. Just install VirtualBox and then you can boot your Linux Mint or any other OS and use it or install it just like it was on a dedicated machine! Pretty cool, if you ask me. I use a lot of virtual machines to run various servers.
- Dual/
Multi-Boot : If you have Windows already in place, you can install Linux Mint to be a boot option on startup. This is a full install and is really about as easy as using the whole disk to install Linux on, but you keep Windows as an option. As long as you have enough space, this is a great option. A bit more advanced operation is that you can actually multiboot. This is where you have severalOS’s as options at boot up. It’s not really hard to do, but you need to make sure you know what you are doing with the bootloader if you decide to do more than dual boot. - Whole System Install: If you are sure you can live without Window, or you are willing to install Windows on a virtual machine inside your Linux install, then you can have the install wipe Windows and take over your whole machine. Be sure that if you ever might want to install Windows that you have the software and keys available or you will have to buy another copy.
Feeling like giving it a try?