It was as easy as reformatting a usb stick, changing the boot order and turning off bitlocker, which was on for some reason?? but i havent used linux since, i dunno Mandrake 10? I was a kid, and it has been ages. It changed to mandriva about a year or two after i bought their CD set.

anyway I'm decently competent at computers i guess? i occasionally do stuff in powershell on windows, and the terminal or w/e seems neat. I used to do more coding, a skill i refreshed and picked up during quarantine. I'm mostly familiar with Microsoft's .net stuff though.

i shoved vs code and some stuff on it, but like, what's needed to kind of, well, replace a windows desktop? I gave it a 300gb partition, which is 30% of my available space, so i need to use this thing.

I am mostly getting peeved as shit and annoyed by Microsoft's increasingly aggressive "we gotta force people to upgrade, gotta shove horseshit AI nonsense on our stuff, gotta re-enable ads on the desktop" bullshit. I even paid for windows 10 pro, this isn't a free license, and it's still a nightmare in this way and frankly i'm done. the appeal of starting with a fairly barebones OS (i'm aware i can go much more stripped down with OSes like this, not the point) is intense right now.

but i realize now i genuinely know jack shit about dick outside of microsoft and android environments and i want advice.

The laptop itself is mostly a niche use laptop, but while I'm not an advanced dork in these matters, i probably know enough to leverage it to replace windows if i can know what the strengths of this platform are, what the good software is for software development (is Code gonna be it?), whether Wine is still the emulation software of choice, that stuff.

One thing I'd really like to do is learn what the default install of Mint+Cinnamon is doing, how to go over the different components, how to pick and choose what i want this thing doing. I didn't find the official documentation overly helpful, troubleshooting the install aside, so i wanted to ask here

If i can get there, and get some windows based software running that I need, i'll ditch the windows partition entirely, and i'd like to get there.