Fair enough. Mine is secondhand off ebay, far from “new computer” expensive, but I get having to make-do for things you don’t really need.

I recently installed mint myself! I have it set up to dual-boot with windows.

It’s been relatively pain-free and the OS itself is great! but I fucked up not partitioning enough space for my home directory (thinking I’d store most things on a separate drive or share with my windows partition until I was ready to fully jump to linux - this was very dumb of me). The fix has been annoying enough (my installation media won’t run anymore so I either have to fix the media or find a way to partition a drive while it is in use) that I have just defaulted to using Windows most of the time.

I also had some windows-mirrored drives that I just decided to split for the time being until I find a way to re-mirror them without accidentally torching my data, or I at least have it backed up somewhere first.

Techno-babble aside, the install itself is easy as long as you don’t try to do anything complicated like I did. If you do decide to dual-boot despite this warning, just make sure you partition ample space for all of your applications and data. Otherwise you should be just fine and tbh I wish I’d done it sooner (and better lol).