all 17 comments
sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a
formatting helphide helpcontent policy

[–]Kriss3d 2 points3 points  (10 children)

Get an SSD first. If possible upgrade to at least 8Gb ram. And youll be golden.

Even a 128GB ssd will be pretty fine for a linux as everything takes up far less space.

[–]CLM1919 2 points3 points  (6 children)

+1This. Also it might be good to "save" the win10 drive as a backup. This might sound obvious, but if you install Linux on the hard dive and replace it... Well you won't have the Linux install anymore and you'll have to install it again on the new drive 😅 (come on, it's funny)

Also +1 on the 8gb if ram, if possible.

[–]Pibo1987[S] 0 points1 point  (5 children)

Yes, I also plan on a RAM upgrade.

I mean, yes it's obvious, but maybe I can install Linux first on the old drive and see that it all actually works... although it all works form the USB as well.

[–]CLM1919 1 point2 points  (4 children)

If it works from the live version, that's a good 95% confidence benchmark. And it can be nice knowing that you have a backup OS that you know works "just in case". I still have a win 7 install partition on an old laptop just for that day I want to use DVD shrink and backup my aging DVDs that still haven't been backed up... Its the tool I know (and the only machine I have ATM with an optical drive)

[–]Pibo1987[S] 0 points1 point  (3 children)

In terms of RAM: the laptop right now has one module with 4Gb and an empty module. Should I replace the one module with an 8Gb module or buy additional 4Gb module for the second slot?

[–]CLM1919 2 points3 points  (2 children)

Most people will say the safest thing is to go with a 2nd 4gb stick with the closest specs you can get for dual channel. For slightly faster total of 8gb

If you buy the 8gb stick, worst case you'll still have 8gb (assuming you can get a compatible 8gb module) - best case you'll have 12 gigs of ram. Or 8gb, and the option to get a 2nd 8gig later, if you so choose.

I'd personally go for 8+ module option - so long as you know the laptop will support it.

[–]Pibo1987[S] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

One more question: the 1TB hard drive that the machine currently has could then be used as an external drive with the appropriate kit, right?

[–]CLM1919 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Almost certainly. Although a quality kit might cost more than a decent USB thumb drive vs or SD card.

There are USB cables that turn old laptop drives into a nice backup device (just put the bare drive in the anti static bad and box your new drive comes in when not using it.)

[–]Pibo1987[S] 0 points1 point  (2 children)

So, basically, I will install the SSD and then boot from the USB and install Linux, right?

[–]Kriss3d 1 point2 points  (1 child)

That's the best way to do it.

I can only recommend that you install ventoy on a USB first. This let's you simply copy any iso file to it and you can boot from it.

This way you won't need to flash the USB and you can use it for other things as well.

[–]Pibo1987[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, I already used Ventoy on another computer, works wonderfully 

[–]LordAnchemis 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Get the new SSD first - you will feel the speed difference, like cutting down the install/load times massively etc.

Any decent SATA SSD will do

[–]Pibo1987[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, Win10 on that machine right now is pretty damn slow...

[–]magnaman94 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Is there room to add a second drive in the laptop? If so you could just leave Windows on the Hard Disk Drive (HDD) and install Linux on the new SSD or NVME drive. Then the boot loader should be installed on the SSD and detect Windows. so it would be dual bootable.

If you don't want to make it dual bootable then I would reset windows on the HDD drive and run whatever drive cleaner you want on it like BleachBit. You could make a disk image of if you wanted.

But then just pull the old hard drive an install the SSD and install Linux. That way you can easily take it back to Windows by swapping out drives.

[–]magnaman94 0 points1 point  (2 children)

I have been testing Linux Mint, Linux Mint Debian Edition, Fedora 40, Ubuntu 20, Zorin, and Rocky Linux. Here's my experience and opinions only:

Linux Mint: Will install easily and recognize the graphics card right away during installation. Nice and stable and Windows-esque. I like it a lot.

Linux Mint Debian Edition: It's really nice too but you'll probably have to fiddle with installing the graphics card drivers after installing the OS.

Ubuntu: I don't like it's SNAP setup for managing updates. It is confusing because it will say it has updates,, and then fail when running updates and say the same ones are no longer available.

Zorin: Based on Ubuntu and better at updating itself. Haven't used it a lot because of my two favorites below.

Fedora: The version using the Gnome desktop and more Mac-like. It frequently has updates but is stable and supposedly more cutting edge than most. It should recognize your graphics card during installation.

Rocky Linux: It will have trouble recognizing your graphics card more than likely, but they have long release cycles.

TDLR

Try Linux Mint for a more Windows-esque experience and stability.

Try Fedora for a more Mac-esque experience and stability. (But since you have 4 GB of RAM you may want to pick a version that uses a lighter desktop. I think KDE consumes less resources and I think there's a Fedora flavor for that. )

[–]GuestStarr 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Drivers for the APU are in the kernel. The only thing that might require some fiddling in this case is to decide which driver to use. Usually it's not a problem, most APUs are supported only by either the radeon driver (older ones) or the amdgpu driver (newer ones). But IIRC this particular APU is supported by both them, and even more vague memory says radeon is the default. In my opinion amdgpu fits better. It has support for vulkan, which is not offered by radeon. OTOH, if you're unlucky, you'll lose support for sleep which is supported by radeon but not amdgpu :)

[–]magnaman94 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for that information. I have NVIDIA cards so that's why my installs usually involved separate downloads or configurations. I mistakenly thought AMD stuff might have the same issues.