Two things:

1. Obviously it needs to come pre-installed. This is a really tough hurdle to overcome and I’m not sure how it can be.
2. Security needs a lot of work if Linux is going to lose the small-target advantage.

I think you could still use that music software on Windows 10. I’m not sure when they’ll cut off support for outdated operating systems but I don’t think many would jump ahead of Microsoft. Windows 10 being unsupported doesn’t mean that much if the software you use is trusted and you have a disaster recovery plan.

It’s important to have a solid backup policy in place for any data you don’t want to lose. Regardless of whether you’re on Windows 11 or Windows XP. If you want to keep using Windows 10, you can. Just gotta only install trusted software and use a browser that is getting security updates for Windows 10 (so not Edge, don’t know which others will be fine). You can watch porn on it too, porn sites are only as dangerous as your browser is insecure.

Now, the question of gaming. Dual-booting into Bazzite should meet your needs (I’ve never used it) but the question is how to keep it away from Windows 10. I live booted into a system with Windows 11 installed and could easily view and modify all the contents. Any malware that gets through Steam’s and Linux’s protections could easily install ransomware and cookie-stealers on Windows 11. This is true just as much for running the games natively on Windows 11.

Seperate devices would solve the issue, but that’d be a waste. Security in computing really needs SO much work. There are so many levels to this. If your security posture is relaxed enough you can just hope no malware gets through Steam’s checks and onto Bazzite, or into any of Bazzite’s dependencies. With meltdown and spectre I’m failing to imagine how I could keep Windows 10 or 11 safe from malware from gaming beyond Steam’s protections.

TLDR: Stick to Windows 10, install trusted software only and keep backups, dual-boot Bazzite for games, hope Steam catches any game malware I guess.

Swap and RAM are not the same thing. Swap is not written to as carelessly as RAM.

I don’t believe this is true, but since I don’t need hibernation I’m going with a swap file anyway.

Sorry for the late reply, I didn’t have time this week to look into what a swapfile was and I delayed my response until I did. I will definitely be using a swap file since I do not ever use hibernation and encrypting my swap partition seems like a hassle.

I’m currently reinstalling things (after accidentally bricking the Windows partition and finding myself dissatisfied with openSUSE). Hopefully with just 4 partitions total (EFI, Kubuntu encrypted, Mint Xfce encrypted, data). I am removing the /boot from each because unless I’m leaving /boot unencrypted there’s no reason to separate it out. Unfortunately encrypting /boot means GRUB doesn’t detect it automatically in the Kubuntu installer so I’m still working out how to correct that.

Linux Mint is a really good choice. I recently tried OpenSUSE and ran into all kinds of issues that I didn’t have with Mint. Hardware issues were the only issues I had with Mint. I prefer Xfce to Cinnamon though, preferably with the DesktopPal97 theme.

That is the extent of the help I can provide.

EDIT: Oh also, check that their hardware supports Linux. The glorious Arch wiki has that information available for a lot of distros.

I suggest Mint, don’t know if you’ve tried it but it seems like the best choice.

Bazzite is a gaming focussed distro and if you don’t really game you don’t need it. I tried using OpenSUSE and it’s really apparent that they’re focused more on system administrators than desktop users (and system administrators are the only ones they monetize).

In all seriousness, do you actually have any problems with Mint? Can’t really answer if we don’t know what you’re dissatisfied with in your current setup. I myself tried OpenSUSE because I wanted to give KDE a shot.

If I run out of space I’ll just wipe and reinstall. Simple.

Looked it up and that’s wrong. An SSD doesn’t wear-level based on the partitions but on a firmware level.

Some of the responses I got were about how the swap partition is useless, and someone else replied to them that they were wrong. I haven’t responded to these people because I don’t yet understand who’s right. I’ll use a swap file or just no swap altogether once I check for myself if the anti-swap people are nutters. I assume temporary files aren’t saved to swap but instead to temp so I can’t imagine what it’s used for on an SSD.

I found yet another thing I’d need to manually install with OpenSUSE Leap (and at that point I may aswell use Arch with all it’s documentation glory). I didn’t have any of these issues with Ubuntu-based distros so I’m doing a fresh install with Kubuntu.

I’m gonna LVM it with two distros and a shared data partition.

Lost my license key anyway. Goodbye forever Windows 11.

Doesn’t matter anyway. It wouldn’t fit on my USB so I shrunk the partition and now my copy of Windows 11 is bricked.

Yep, gonna clone and delete Windows 11.

Library might work.

I’m using Mint for sensitive matters, I want to keep it separate from my daily driver.

I’ll basically just be using this laptop for web-browsing.

I don’t really use hibernation. I’ll need to enable swap encryption though.

Looks like it’s included in Ubuntu too, so I think I’ll use that (I’m changing to Kubuntu after yet again needing to find missing packages).

Well, I’m not doing that.

I’m an accounting graduate, so yes. Most things should be in a browser really, since generally a webpage can’t give you malware.

Could I preserve the activation key the refurbisher provided doing that (I’m gonna google whether I can anyway)?

My old laptop doesn’t have a TPM or Secureboot (or a working CTRL key). So that idea’s out.

I’ll try and put it on a VM, not sure whether that’ll preserve my key though.

I absolutely do not trust Windows 11 to be a good dual-boot citizen so I’m going to remove it. Gonna replace OpenSUSE with Kubuntu so I’ll do it then.

Time to clone and delete the Windows partition.